DARPA Scientist UNLOADS on AI Doomers, DNA Gene Editing & CERN | Lee Cronin

Lee it's great to have you back man last time you were here episode 289 was like a year and a half ago you closed up like we literally stopped the cameras and then you're like yeah I was doing some work for DARPA as well and you just lay that one on us and I'm like well that I mean you're supposed to say that at the beginning of the podcast but now you're telling me like ah it's not that big a deal how's DARPA not a big deal I mean I'm like a big DARPA fan yeah I don't so um I will I've had maybe let me get this right so how many grants have I had from DARPA so DARPA is a funder right they're a funder they're a they're a grant funder they give people money um I think they're them the reason they were established you know why they were established I think you can you can check this so their mandate was like to not when Sputnik went up into space the US were not expecting that satellite the Soviets launched a satellite I believe it was in the 50s I think that's right and and it basically DARPA was then established to to to eliminate strategic surprise so they were so basically that wanted a load of money fund people do crazy things and also to have a mandate to do stuff so arguably DARPA might have had something to do with say the internet right self-driving cars um and um a few years ago DARPA started looking at um chemistry and AI like many years ago way not way before way before the hype now and they there was a program they started called make it actually um and I and the the person who started it you know they kind of used um uh some terminology from one of my papers and I was kind of a bit grumpy they didn't offer me any funding right because they had they gave money to MIT to Stanford Research Institute DARPA plagiarized Lee Cronin I didn't you used the p-word I did they were inspired I said anyway they I remember they got on a call with me and I was like complaining bitterly um the bet that they used this paragraph of you know what I was trying to do and they're like Dr. Cronin we're phoning you up because we want to talk to you about that and I was like okay and basically what it turned out is they wanted me to put in a white paper and I said okay I want this you know a zillion dollars and they said well why not ask for a little bit less and do this thing that fits into our program you know it's U.S. taxpayers and you're one of the uh you know few groups overseas doing this thing and we think it would be valuable for us and what was the thing specifically so it was to it was to um it was part of their make it program can you make molecules on demand right in theater or you know on the moon in Antarctica whatever right how do we do chemistry robotically and then when they asked me about that and I've been building chemical robots for years hey guys if you're not following me on Spotify please hit that follow button and leave a five star review they're both a huge huge help thank you you've been building chemical robots for years yeah yeah yeah yeah that's a dense statement for for since 2012 right 20 so about yeah about 14 years how would you define a chemical robot for people out there who are unfamiliar a robot that you give instructions to and it will do chemistry so yeah I mean it's a it's fit it's out so I made I can tell you about it but let me answer the DARPA question because you asked so that was the first grant they gave me make it and they and that they carried on giving money there and then they were they had a one-on computation using molecules to make molecular computers and I I got money from DARPA there and that was in a U.S. consortium so there was a couple other groups in the U.S. right and then there was another uh grant that gave me uh for a couple other groups in the U.S. right and then there was another uh grant that gave me uh for kind of advanced using AI for discovery so they were the three DARPA grant I think there's three DARPA grants what year did they give you the AI grant I can't remember I mean ballpark 2019 2018 2019 and then it carried on through the pandemic it was a bit tougher in the pandemic but DARPA a brilliant organization right they go where the experts are they don't give grants to people in countries that are probably anti-america I would say right so don't just say they're not they didn't fund bin laden so they're and and also they they want to start new fields and they want to start fields that are going to obviously be of strategic importance right and the U.K. and the U.S. have done a lot of um hookups in different scientific disciplines for a long while so I thought that was quite good um the molecular I made a molecular computer chemicals to do computation as well because I what does that mean yeah I don't know yeah I mean so so well I know what it means now so what does a computer do so a computer we're around going everywhere but anyway let's start with what is a chemical computer a chemical computer is a chemistry set where you could put in inputs the the the data you input the data and into the chemistry somehow and the chemistry would then take that data and process it using chemical reactions rather than transistors on silicon and then you'd read it out using it some method and I was like I built a chemical computer um using a thing called the bluzov-zabaskinsky reaction which is a chemical clock and all it does goes tick tock tick tock or red blue red blue red blue okay so basically pour a lot of chemicals in the pot you could just take uh you know maybe a just a beaker which is like a like a glass put in half fill it up halfway put in some chemicals and without doing anything just leaving look watching it it would flash red blue red blue red blue whilst you're stirring it when you stop stirring it it would basically stop but then spontaneously flash one color or another what's called an excitable media it's a bit like how think about how neurons flash so that's a cool idea why don't I just basically make a grid of stirrers so I 3d printed a grid basically about the size of a small book and in that grid there was it was seven by seven grid so 49 um little wells and I put a stirrer bar in each one and had put a little motor under it and stirred them and put the chemical reaction in and all the colors went across the grid and I used a web camera to basically read out the colors and so when the stirrers were on I could that that was a one when a stirrer was off that was a zero and I basically then uh put uh basically printed in ones and zeros to represent some input and then just read it out and then worked out what it was doing we kind of just made it up to start with yeah what does that tell us when you're done well that's hey it's a DARPA project it's supposed to be crazy bad no so what it was supposed to do is is could I could I somehow use the because remember the bz is a clock tick tock tick tock tick tock if you put a load of clocks together and you allow them to synchronize as they desynchronize you could process some information so we actually used it to classify and we used it to make a primitive neural net and the idea was a neural net you literally used no power and was quite good at error correction and could like refine images so the same way you'd use chat GPT or you'd use a kind of Nvidia's architecture to do gradient descent um and what is gradient descent well it's basically that it changes the weightings in the in the neural network and to basically you know kind of maximize um its training capability so you have the weights and the and the activations two different things but basically this was a chemical neural net it was the idea it was the first step I'm now making brain gels but that's another you're making brain gels now because we put that and put it in a gel because it was all liquid it's sloppy and it the memory wasn't that good but if you put it in a gel then maybe you could then basically use the polymer gel to flip to switch in such a way you could teach the system to learn for a longer period of time how does that work scientifically no idea that's why I did it so you're trying to figure it out it basically yeah I mean look we're again we're all over the place but why not that's good I was inspired by the episode of pickle Rick and Rick and Morty and I was like well I and so so so so it's like I took a gherkin right and attached the gherkin to the mains to 240 volts and then put in load low you know my workshop I have at home um and used a bunch of electrodes and I tried to program the gherkin to recognize the difference between a circle and a square but it kept exploding kept exploding because it kept heating up with them so I had so long so I took the gherkin I thought the gherkin could be a good um it seemed like a good idea it's like it always does a gherkin computer like literally you could just be making this up right it's like yeah just anyway so gherkin heat it up to put it in there it sounds ridiculous you heat it up by putting it in the 240 volts what would happen to the ions potassium ions because it's in salt so you've got this gherkin you soak it in the salt so it has this salt in it it's conducting when you put power when you put electricity into it when you put alternating current at high voltage it heats up and basically the ions can move around so it literally makes an excitable media a bit like the BZ reaction like flashing on or phone off but here with a gherkin and then when I put in little electrodes I put in a little grid and I was then trying to basically train the gherkin to tell the difference between a square and a circle because it was made malleable it's a bit like taking some uh taking a some and making it liquid again and then you make it liquid again and it'll learn something and you'll set it but the thing is the gherkin kept exploding before i could actually train it and this is in your lab at your house i did at home yeah i mean i don't think the university would be too happy so now fast forward to the brain gel i was like well look if i could take a gel and then make the gel conduct right so it conducts electricity a bit like a um um yeah like a wire but and then put in electrodes on one face and the other and program one surface using a camera so i could just take a visual feed and plug it into the jet into the gel and then basically read out as i show the camera to different objects can the gel tell the difference between the edges on the objects and train it in the same way you'd use open cv or some kind of um silicon based um system for edge detection right it's a bit like you use a jetson nano or something right and that and i was just playing around if i could use material to compute turns out you can but the now you're like when you said well how's that work and i laughed well it's not because i'm making it up but because the way you program material is the material responds in time um according to its stimuli so it's very much trial and error so it's a bit like how the brain has evolved like the brain has evolved over billions of years and so the brain has a number of different kind of programming periods it was programmed by evolution so your brain let's say it's 3.8 billion years old so that's time that's time number one then um you are created by your parents so over a period of nine months your brain is growing in the womb as you as you and so your brain is starting to program when you're then born obviously between you go through massive developmental surges so you know age 21 22 your brain may be fully almost completely gone and you're able to program your brain in a so then your brain is then able to process data in real time so there's all these different developmental stages so the brain is able to evolve grow be programmed activate and then continue to work and we have no idea how brains work and what are unique to brains well sentience consciousness the purpose the the and a living system that will tell you that they are an individual you talk to all humans most humans can communicate with will communicate with you we'll claim they're an individual do you desperately need a nicotine pouch every 15 minutes just to feel normal so does joey deep he's a complete addict which is why deep started using ultra's new energy pouches they've been an elite upgrade for this fiend ultra pouches are instant energy in one pouch ain't that right thief oh yeah he's been using them obsessively for about a month now and they've been giving him a huge intense energy boost when he needs that extra kick in the morning during work or before working out these are 100 nicotine free pouches and they give you energy in a way that's completely different from nicotine coffee or other pouches ultra energy pouches still contain some caffeine to give you that little lift the real difference comes from their other ingredients including l-theanine to smooth out the energy and curb the crash vitamin b3 to turn carbs fat 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That's TakeUltra.com, link in my description below, for 15% off with code JULIAN. After you purchase, they're going to ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them I sent you. So you think the brain is the thing that is strictly just programming that in and it might not necessarily mean that that's the case? No, no. I think there is something very interesting. I don't think it stops at the brain. I think biological systems are very complicated, but I think humans are unique in that they will claim to be an individual with words if we teach them language. And I think that's something that we don't understand how chemistry gives rise to consciousness and how chemistry gives rise to the fact that I will claim to be me and I have my own particular personality and do stuff. This is very important in this time because we're viewing that AIs are entities that are sentient and they are indeed they are not. Yeah, you've made a lot of arguments on this because you think that, for example, a lot of AI doomers are making leaps that the AI can exist without human beings, I guess, in the future. And you don't agree that that's the case. Yeah, clearly, clearly not. It's fantastical. Why do you say it's fantastical? Well, we've not seen any evidence of that. So if we think about the origin of AI, right, if you go all the way back, origin of life, the AI is produced by, well, let's say the origin of the term AI was at the DARPA, sorry. Wait a minute. Don't do that. The Dartmouth meeting, which you know, you can fact check it. It's a little Freudian slip right there. Sure. Whatever. Let's build as many conspiracies as we can. Go. But I think DARPA have funded some AI work, right? Right at the beginning. So at Dartmouth College, the term AI was kind of coined. When was that again? In the 50s? I mean, I don't know, 56? I don't know. But a long time ago, maybe a bit later. And so, but if you think about what a computer is, a computer is a deterministically built system. It's switches, right? And the way those switches work is we build, a computer is built out of switches. Those switches have high and low. You put those together to make logic gates. Those logic gates, the universal logic gate in a computer is enormous. And NAND gate. And NAND gate. Yeah. And NOTAND, right? You can build everything with NOTANDs, right? You can, so NOTANDs are literally, you can build memories, you can build everything. The way you architect those together, you build the silicon, the silicon infrastructure for everything we have today is based on that. There may be some differences that I'm, you know, electrical engineers watching this, listening to this might be shouting, go, no, that's wrong. There are other things called ASICs, which are basically that you might be able to do. What we would call neuromorphic computing, where basically you could have an analog voltage. So in a transistor, you basically, typically you would have a voltage between zero and five, five is high, one, zero is low, zero, and something in between. And if it's on the zero side, you call it a low, and if it's on the five volt side, you call it a one. But I'm not a qualified electrical engineer, so I don't know how the ASICs are built today. I've designed some ASICs for fun, but yeah, well, I want to build a brain. So if I want to build a device, a chemical brain, I have to design a, I need to have an analog kind of electrical system for addressing the chemical brain. But we'll get there later. Yeah, we'll come back to that. So the most important thing with a computer is like, it's fairly deterministic in some regard, and what, sorry, let's not say that, it's digital. And so that means I can put in the inputs in there and go on. So with AIs today, they're based upon digital computers, and they use all this digital infrastructure. We take massive amounts of data and train a model, and the model can do splendid things. But the doomers say that these models could run away. And I agree the models could run away with bad humans running them, right? There's always a human in the loop. The human is turning on the power station. The AIs, although they are, they use terms like recursively self-programming. I mean, it's a bit like you and I could build an AI now that we can have a loop in a program, like, you know, do this thing. And if this thing occurs, then do that thing and carry on until it either hits the objective or someone turns off the computer. Now, that's always been the case, right? Those loops have always existed. So the AI doomers are kind of stuck in this like, this kind of fantastical reality whereby they say that AI could overtake the world and cause a nuclear explosion or something else. What I think is more likely is that bad humans using the AI to do bad things will happen. And I do worry about that. So I'm not dismissing AI doomers. I'm dismissing AI doomers who are saying, this thing will happen because magic. On its own. Yeah. Got it. And I think that is actually a major, a major worry because they're talking about magic. And actually, there's just some doomer going, some bad actor going, I'm going to use AI to crack into this system and do some damage. Or I'm going to use an AI to bot system that will basically do some social engineering on social media to cause some kind of effect, right? So I think that I haven't seen any evidence of sentience in any AI, right? No, no, no. Sentience comes from humans exclusively. Any evidence of sentience you get from the internet, If you say to Claude, are you alive? Claude will probably say, no, I'm not alive. And they'll use I. And this anthropomorphization is just to hook you to be addicted to talking to the entity. What if it's a format? What if it's a technicality though? And it doesn't get to sentience, but because, and I'm going to way oversimplify this for a minute, we're able to eventually or create technology that isn't quite simply plugged in and unplugged to be able to do that. Because of that, a non-sentient, but extremely intelligent artificial intelligence who has no ability to empathize, obviously feel any sort of emotion or level of humanity, took actions that it doesn't understand the grave consequences of. Do they have an argument for something like that to possibly happen? So I don't quite understand the statement, but I know what you mean, so I'm not going to be too obtuse, but AIs, are they intelligent? They are intelligent. We have to define intelligence. What really makes me very confused is there are people out there that say, in next years, the AI will be more intelligent than any human. And what does that mean? What is intelligence? If you can't measure something, so could the AI cause something to happen on its own? No. Could humans not understanding how to set up a system cause something bad to happen? Think about social engineering. I don't know, take any system like this is kind of hard because I'm not a qualified, I'm not qualified. But let's say we're going to, I don't know, create a type of bylaw in the city that says, right, we have to have trees every, for you to get planning permission in the city, every time you build a building, you have to have a tree on every corner or something. So suddenly, before you know it, there's just random trees everywhere. Yeah. And I was going to say, bless you people, but bless you twice. There's dying over here. So what happens is when humans make decisions and policies, they get propagated and they get propagated by systems, whether it's in a corporation or in an institution or in a software algorithm, right? So those things get propagated and there are unforeseen consequences of them. And I totally buy that AI is object. Trying to build, to achieve an objective could do bad things. But those bad things, humans are in the loop all the time. And I guess what I'm trying to say is the, the AI is not bad. The human is bad or the training data is bad. Yeah. So don't, so, and that would, if I agreed with that point and you might be right, you know, I, I, I honestly hope you're right. And it is in control of humanity, by the way, selfishly speaking here, but like, let's assume though, there are some sociopaths who have their hands on the trigger with these things, which I think it's fair to say some of the technocrats we have in the world, not all of them, but some of them may fit that bill. What's to stop people like, you know, to put a name on it, like a Sam Altman who jokes about humanity ending. What's to stop him from being like, ah, you know, today I want to play fucking World of Warcraft, but with AI and let it go wild. So look, um, I have a lot of sympathy for people who are building companies and building technologies. I'm building one myself right now, which we can talk about. I think we have to kind of, we have to take a step back and say, what are we built? How are we building our technologies? How are we regulating those technologies? And, and how are, how do we then get feedback from the regulation of those technologies to make sure that the human good things are happening to humanity. That's right. So if we, if let's take an example where this has already happened, right? We got the internet and then we've got social media. So what was the critical failure in social media has given us arguably, I don't think anyone would argue that social media is particularly nice right now, right? What's the failure? Yeah, I think there's a bunch of them. So there's one critical thing that people should have done, uh, which was the policymaker should have said to social media, they should be treated like publishers. Mmm. Section 230. Something like that. I don't know what the US version is. So if you're treated like a publisher, that is anything you put on your, on your, on your platform, you have to basically be held accountable for. And so that you, that you don't, when you start putting nonsense out there, um, it can be taken, you have to say, no, it's clearly a lie. Put it down. Right. So basically Facebook and. You're good. You're good. So Facebook and X and, um, Instagram and all the, and all these entities are not accountable for the stuff they put out. Now that's, for me, that's a real problem because basically that, that entire decision, although, you know, they're, they're a medium, it's a bit like you can't hold the type, the person who built the type, the printing press liable for the bad books printed. Right. I get that the same way we might argue when you talk about my chemical robots, am I going to be liable for anyone making any bad chemistry on them? But I, I do think there's something we can learn from the social media and the fact we didn't, we didn't regulate that. We didn't hold them accountable. And so, um, it's very hard to know how it's going to evolve. However, having said that, that if someone invents the social media, there's quite good as in, you know, a nice place to be and not a hellscape. Right. And if we can work out why humans are very good at being, you know, you, you get a anger for attention, right? Sorry. If you create anger, you get the attention the system wants. So, you know, if there was a social media system whereby, I'm not saying it should be like, you know, some kind of Mary Poppins world where everyone's like, you know, it's all flying around and all happy, but, but there, I guess we have to understand the psychology of social media and the negative effects it has, particularly on teenagers. When I grew up, there was no social media. And I've seen that social media has been probably an net negative for a lot of teenagers, but some might argue is like, well, in, in, in environments where they don't have access to social centers or youth clubs and things, there's people can work, play online, play games, interact one another, support one another. And we don't see all those positive things because only the negative things are amplified. So when it comes to AI, we have a similar quandary, which is how do we, how do we let the free market and free humans dictate what's happening? Because there is one argument. If you look at the difference between, say, anthropic and maybe open AI, anthropic basically won't let you do anything on the models because it's got some kind of higher purpose wired in. Whereas open AI is like, no, no, I'm going to serve you as the entity. And actually if I'm a, I want to, and if I choose to use the object to do bad things and I'm breaking the law, then I should be held accountable. Sure. Whereas like, and I think, so I, I'm not sure if I'm getting that correct, but it seems to me that there is a kind of a split right in this right now, but, but that's kind of obscured by the doom is saying AI could run away. And I don't understand the mechanism for running away. I do understand the mechanism for tinkering. I do understand the mechanism for, but may put disinformation out there or for doing some kind of now the conspiracy theories that don't aren't yet possible. Here's one crazy thing. Look, there's no real conspiracy theories in history. Not many, because humans. Humans couldn't keep them secret, but if we had good AIs and we could just pump, you could play around with the future with the AIs pretty well. And that might be one thing to be worried about. Now, you know, is there one big con if we say that, you know, one particular political movement or post second world war, when the winners talk about what happened, could that be one big glorified conspiracy theory? Because obviously the winners write the history books. Okay. Yeah. There's always a percentage that's written by victors for sure. As far as like, when you look at a story, it's never 100% what was said. I take issue with when you then try to say, well, if 5% wasn't what we were told, therefore a hundred percent's not, you know, you gotta be careful with where you go with that stuff. Absolutely. And I think that's really important. And in terms of nowadays, I think, um, I, that critical reasoning to what can I verify and what, what do I find impactful to me is really important. So I think one of the things that I think AI will accelerate the, the teaching of critical reasoning. Right now we're in this real, um, I, I worry a lot about, um, how young people are going to be allowed to get their first job, you know, make mistakes, get the training, the mastery is required, have the, the, the hard work emotion. Frustration is the best trainer, right? But whereas like people don't want to get frustrated now, just use chat GPT. Mm. And so, but I think this is an aberration. I think these tools are actually, a lot of them are really good. Like the coding tools are amazing. And so I, I do wonder, and this is me actually shifting my emphasis a bit. If AI might actually save us all. Save us all. Save us all because social media is such a clusterfuck, right? If you listen to my show, you know, I take my supplements every day, religiously. And you've also heard me talk about how the supplement industry is really crowded with a lot of fake products too. 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And help me, you know, straw man or steel man a particular argument, and then also help me understand as objectively as possible how I might frame that argument. Because if nothing else, these AIs might be able to allow you to do one-to-one teaching. They've got infinite time, infinite patience, and if you use them correctly. If you use them correctly. Well, we might be, yeah, if we can use anything incorrectly, like I say, you know, so I'm kind of, I'm, as you might tell in this conversation, where I'm just saying wildly contradictory things. Strong opinions loosely help. Yeah, I mean, for sure. For sure. But I do think that the doomers are kind of like, they're kind of out, it's a bit like, you know, well, I would say that the doomers serve a very good purpose, but I just wonder if the doomers could actually help us by shifting their doom to the real issues that we need to deal with, such as like bad actors using the systems, right? Well, that's the thing that I'm thinking about with your world right there that you're painting. On paper, that would make sense, but again, if these different platforms, because there's many of them, are going to actually be a positive and help teach critical thinking and things like that, for a person to be able to do that themselves, then I think a requirement for humanity for all of them across the board would then be you need to open source all the code at all times, because you don't want to know, or you want to make sure that there are not human beings, you know, just slightly injecting their little opinions into coding the actual AI, I'm going to use a fake word here, but the AI organism that is going to teach us to what we do. Well, I mean, no, you're not. AI organisms are cybernetic organisms. They are the combination of human programmers and the model working together, right? So I'm very happy to say the sentience in the AI comes from the humans, right? This is really the nice mystery that we can talk about. But look, I'm uniquely unqualified, although, to say what the models do, because I don't build, well, I mean, I build models, but I build models based on data and very basic learning algorithms and systems, because I need a first principles to understand it. And if I can't understand it, then I don't tend to implement it. And the reason for that is like, I need to understand what the model is doing. And a lot of these models are kind of they've got lots of meta levels, it's a bit like having a conversation with someone, and you think they're understanding you, and you've got completely different images in your head. And then you leave the conversation, they go and do something else, they're completely different to what you thought they would do. And likewise, so you can have what you've got to be able to do with these systems to somehow ground them and understand conceptually what's going on. In science, that's really important. The only thing I have exception to in AI, my hard lines are, the AIs are not intelligent, right? They're not intelligent. How do you define intelligence? Yeah, that is the question that makes sense. Because people talk about AI, AGI, and superintelligence. What is superintelligence, everybody? Like, is superintelligence like some kind of magic that I don't understand? And what is artificial general intelligence? Let's go all the way back. And I've got very strong positions on this, which I think, you know, will endure the time. So intelligence, I would define to be a property of an entity to solve problems that will allow that entity to survive. So this is like a biology, right? So now, a general intelligence would be an entity that cannot solve almost any problem to come that's coming at it to survive. An entity that cannot solve? Can solve any problem. So you've got, basically, you could say your entity is really good at mathematics, right? Now, people will say, well, the AIs are good at mathematics, and they do solve problems. So now we're saying, right, well, I think that the AIs are very good at taking a prompt, a problem that you give it, and say, please, when you've got this data set, help me interrogate this data set and give me the outcomes. And so what I'm playing with right now is trying to engage with people positively about what we mean by intelligence, right? And intelligence is a very interesting thing. And what I will say to you is that we do not know yet how to define or measure it. I'm working on a problem, a shadow problem that I'm uniquely unqualified for, maybe uniquely qualified for, which will have a go at measuring it. And I'm really inspired by going back in science and looking at problems and discontinuities in problems. So the one that I really like is the concept of temperature. We knew in the part all gravity, but let's take temperature. We know that things are hot and cold, but what is that? Oh, that's hot. Oh, that's cold. So that we didn't really know how to measure temperature. We knew some things were hot, some things were cold. It wasn't until humans, scientists were able to, well actually technologists would say, right, what do we need to be able to do? We need to measure temperature, right? How do you measure temperature today? Well, the good old days, you'd have a thermometer. The thermometer could have a number of different liquids in it. You want a liquid that would basically, as the temperature goes up, it would expand and hopefully have kind of a linear relationship. So whether that's mercury or alcohol. Mm-hmm. And so if you take an alcohol and you, so for that expansion, so let's go back. So I just want to say temperature, we knew that things are hot and cold. We didn't have a scale. How do we get a scale? Well, we realized that liquids expand as they get hot and they contract as they cool down. Great. So let's build a system whereby we can measure the expansion of liquid. What technology is required? Well, we need a glass. And what property do we need that glass? We need the glass to be uniform because if you made it fat and thin and fanning out, maybe, you know, a triangle shape, that ain't going to work very well. So you needed to make a really nice tube where the sides of the tube were parallel, was a perfect cylinder, was perfect as you can get. Well, back in earlier times, there were some glass blowers in Italy that perfected how glass blow tubes. Suddenly the glass blow the tubes and then you put the alcohol in. You could go around and measure the temperature everywhere. Suddenly, oh, it feels cold here. We'll go Antarctica, this temperature. Oh, we go here. And of course, the Americans, we're going to have Fahrenheit. I don't know where you guys got Fahrenheit from. Listen, I like Fahrenheit a lot better. It has more units. Like a Celsius, a one degree Celsius jump is a jump. But if it goes like 82 to 83, it's, you know, I'm wearing the same thing. Sure. Okay. We got that right. You got that wrong. Just take the L, please. Well, there is this temperature scale called the absolute scale and Kelvin scale. So one degree Kelvin is the same as one degree Celsius. So it's the same as one degree Kelvin. It's the same as one degree Kelvin. It's the same as one degree Celsius. It just goes down to minus 273 point something or other. So that means zero Kelvin is the lowest temperature you can get. You can't get any colder than zero K, right? In fact, you can't achieve zero K anywhere. On Earth, we've built some really good systems that you can almost get to absolute zero. And what that would mean is the molecules at absolute zero wouldn't do anything. They wouldn't even vibrate. They'd just be like stationary. But anyway, so I digress. Brilliant thing about temperature. Technology was built to measure it, right? We knew things were hot and cold before, but we didn't know quite what it meant. Now intelligence, the problem is human cognition and psychology and IQ tests and all this stuff. And we have people saying, "Well, you know, this AI will be able to solve any problem from a human." They're misunderstanding understanding what intelligence is, giving an algorithm a series of queries to solve, a mathematics test, is not the same thing as a human solving an unseen problem. And intelligence is actually the ability to solve an unseen problem. Now, unseen is hard, right? Because if it's not in my training, I can't solve it. So this is the problem. But when I actually have the problem, and I've solved it, I can train on it. Am I way oversimplifying this if I put it in the bucket of almost what you're saying is logic versus the ability to be creative? We'll get there. Logic is. So the way to. Computers are quite good at using logic if you encode them properly. There's some good programming languages to do it, and they can do lots of things. No. What I'm saying is something super concrete. So intelligence is a thing we don't know yet how to define or measure. And I think for a little hobby, because I'm basically bored and I haven't got enough work. You're bored. I'm far from bored, and I'm too busy. But I think someone needs to have a go at this. And of course, I'm uniquely unqualified. So maybe that'll make me. I've almost finished it, so it's not that hard. So. Yeah, you're so busy, you don't change clothes. I did wash. I have 12. 12 different. I think 12 pink shirts in play today. All right. I'm going to need to see some evidence of that, because that looks like the same shirt as last time. Probably. I don't know. You can check. Maybe the other one was a wide collar one. These are narrower collars. Evidence. I was going to wear a different pink. Anyway, it doesn't matter. It's all right. It looks sharp. It's fine. But you're talking about intelligence. So the nice thing is, I don't have a cognitive load when I dress. It's just pink. That's good. Simple math. It could be like Mark Zuckerberg, and he just wears, I don't know, blue. Blue? Gray? Gray, I think. Does he have like a. He just wears gray. Isn't he kind of like based with fashion now? Like he's always wearing different chains and shit? Sure. I don't know. I mean, me no billionaire. Got it. Me just poor person. Hey, you just raised like 70 milli. I don't want to hear it. Sure. I mean, but I raised it to change the world and chemistry. That's right. Not sort out my wardrobe. That's right. But fine. We can go back there. But let's go back to intelligence measuring, because I want to linger on it. You can measure temperature, and therefore we can have a scale, and we got there. We don't know what intelligence is. We've got the IQ issue. We've also got the race issue that goes along with it, right, that's out there. And also the genetics issue, which was all kind of like crazy, because psychologists and cognitive psychologists and so got confused. But then we got people confusing the AI is getting good at stuff as being intelligent. And so, you know, I think Elon keeps saying, oh, the AI, it's going to be a PhD level in all these subjects right now, and therefore no PhDs. And that is such a fundamental fail. Why? Because PhD, so let me explain how the AIs work right now. And I'm going to convince you, and hopefully by extension, anyone listening or watching this. So AIs today do the following thing. You get a lot of data, you take that data and you train a model. That's right. And that model will be able to tell you what's in that data, right, and find your relationships in that data. Great. So that data, if I say the internet, all the problems solved in the past are encoded. Let's say all the problems solved in that past are captured in that data set. So when you give the AI a problem that's been solved in the past, it can solve it, right? That's not intelligence. That is incredible retrieval. That is incredible retrieval, right? And retention. Exactly, right? And sometimes the AIs aren't that good because they hallucinate and so on. They hallucinate. Well, because of the way the structures of some of these models work, they hallucinate. And so what happens is that because they have to give you back a output, if you say, you know, it's less problematic now because the frontier labs, I don't know what they call the frontier labs, the top AI providers, are very good at basically having what's called a, having a checking system. They might say, well, come out with an answer, we'll check it. Like you would go to chat GPT and say, you know, calculate, do a GIST calculation. It used to just retrieve it using the model. But of course, the model would not get it right because the numbers, the training data and the internet, well, humans kind of were put there by humans. And so it would just give you random number back. But now it says, oh, I recognize. This is a calculation. Let me bring up my calculator tool, press the buttons on the calculating at the number back, right? So the AIs are quite good at doing things like that. But the thing is, the AIs are trained on this huge amount of data. And all the problems that we've solved up till now in humanity are in there. So potentially that's awesome. But a PhD, scientist, mathematician, is not about understanding the past. They're trained on that. It's about. Using the scientific method to solve problems. So whenever you give a new problem that's not in the data set to the AI, it can't solve it. But what if it has enough data and enough retention from all the things in the world that it can keep at one time that a human can't, such that it can find abnormalities or holes or something to be able to then, for lack of a better way of putting it, plug it in a way, in a faster way than a human could. How's that not intelligent? I would not. So because if we, again, we have to define intelligence. You can call it. I would call that very useful, right? My calculator is very useful. There are many tools I've built that have been built that are useful, that enable me as an entity with, you know, with human rights, right, to do stuff. But Einstein with a pencil was much more intelligent than Einstein without a pencil. Because he was able to use a pen and paper, pencil and paper to think. So it's almost like a cybernetic thing. So we get trapped in these circular arguments. Are the AIs intelligent? To all the AIs, do they have free will? And are they sentient? Right? It's where we kind of confuse it. So people use intelligence as a confusion. Intelligent entities can solve problems and want to persist in time. That's called biology. I would say intelligence is a property absolutely reserved for biological. Organisms, right? Now, what are the AIs? We can call them maybe augmented informatics. That would be the word. Augmented informatics? Yeah. That's a lot to say, Lee. I know. It doesn't sound as good as AI, right? Let's get it shorter. Artificial intelligence sounds great, right? I'm like, wow. Right. So there is a culture, there's a zeitgeist associated with it. But again, the AIs aren't magic. They are incredible models. In fact, they are revealing things about human language and cognition. Yeah. That we didn't expect. Like what? The AI, so again, I'm not an expert. So if you train an AI in a certain language, and then you train it in another language, and you look at the representations of those entities, let's say king or queen or brick on cement, they occupy a space that is prelingual. Right? Which is conceptual. In English. What do you make of it? Ask the AI. Basically, there is a mathematical representation beyond the language in a space. Right? Okay. Which is really interesting, but not that surprising. Because humans use language to represent concepts. So if I basically take the Spanish, and I distill Spanish into the English language, then I get the idea that there is a language. Right. Yeah. And then I get the idea that there is a language. So if I basically take the Spanish, and I distill Spanish to find out, you know, love and hate, hot and cold, up and down, and plot them in some space, and I do the same in English, you overlay them, they're very close. This is why AI translation tools are amazing. Right? Yeah. I don't know if. I haven't tried it yet, but this is great German. I learnt German, I'm not very good at it now, but there's a great word in German called gemütlich. Gemütlich. Gemütlich. Which is like, loosely translates as "cozy". Gemütlich? Gemütlich. Because they go, "Oh, das ist gemütlich." Yeah. Okay. If you go into a pub in the UK, and it's a windy winter night, and it's cold outside, and there's a nice fireplace and beer, you go and go, "Oh, that's cozy. Nice." Gemütlich. Yeah. Germans have it. But it doesn't quite translate. Right? Like, it's a different kind of word. So there are cultural representations of the word. It's not like, "Oh, that's cozy." "Oh, that's cozy. Nice." Gemütlich. Yeah. Right? So there are cultural representations. And the Inuits have a lot, right? Because the Inuits have to live in the cold a lot. Right? That's right. So there are lots of terms. But let's go back again. We don't know. Can we measure it? We don't have a measurement. We know what temperature is. So we've got an idea. These AI tools are able to do very important, very interesting things. They can automate a lot of tasks. But I'm going to make one, again, one statement, and I'll keep coming back to it. The AI only knows what it's trained on, and if something is embedded in that data and you query it correctly, you can get that out. Which is great. Right? And the AIs are showing there's a huge amount of knowledge that we haven't explicitly found in the internet, in human knowledge, that we can pull out. But it can't use the way the human brain works. humans query and reason over time to put together patterns to be able to predict how they're going to query in the future and potentially outrun humans before we can get there um i don't i don't understand that statement until i understood all of it until the outrun humans till we get there because if they can patternize everything like let's let me give an example because it's a little bit complex if i'm talking to an ai and a hundred other people in the population are talking to an ai and we're all trying to figure out something about paint and we're asking all these questions about different colors and how we paint a room and whatever the way i ask questions in a series of queries even if it's very similar to the next person the wording might be different or a specific thing i may be interested might be different but the ai is collecting all of these different at at volume and at scale all these different ways of querying things so they can try to pat the ai can you you you you all of its computational technology to be able to patternize what everyone's saying and be able to predict what the optimal questions might actually be so in that way the way i see it is it could be outrunning humans front running them is maybe a better way to put it so yeah this is really interesting so no no no that's not what's happening um thanks for clearing that up well so there i think there's a fallacy here which is super interesting and again look i'm very happy to be wrong on this but um i want to come to it with data so ai's are prediction machines humans are creation machines and so ai's when the creations are kind of shallow the ai is great at finding them you take all these air dish problems all these ways you find you've in mathematics so the ai's are solving i mean that and you find all these um disproving certain conjectures ai's are very good at disproving things by finding a counter example but ai's an ai has not come up with a single creative mathematical act right hasn't come up with a single creative scientific act now people will argue about this now i want to actually stop this argument because actually obscuring what the ai is a good at and i tell you in the last two years last one half years the ai's have supercharged my ability to be creative um because i don't have to spend my time doing things that that um writing code and collecting data and processing things the ai's are splendid at it they're really really great but what they can't do is they can't create they can appear to create right and those creations are relatively shallow but i would say there were and this is where i'm really interested in is that there's a lot of things that are going on that are going on that are where intelligence is intelligence solved intelligence i would measure is by the ability to solve problems that are unseen ai's are able to solve problems that are seen or embedded in their data that's probably called i don't know we should call it a different word like it's not not not a problem so ai's are very good at doing new can do new things right but they can't do novel things and so the question is what is a difference between novel and new and here it is right new is something that you can get from your data set it's just a combination of things it's fairly shallow novel um so you can search for new something new in your data set and find it in the end so when the ai does something and you got all that's exciting you can see that it is just new and it's entirely embedded in that data humans are able to do something which i call novel and novelty is defined by that thing that is in principle not predictable and not embedded in the data so but when i then do it it's a bit like fashion fashion is a music uh that's right i just human you're not going to know when humans are going to do you know i might you might have me back on your podcast one day i might come back wearing a color you weren't anticipating is that new or novel well it's novel because you're in prior data i'm just wearing a new color right right the ai is just going to make in this suit so when i come in wearing i don't know turquoise or something or whatever else you'd be like that's novel and so and it's very interesting that humans are kind of misunderstanding it but there is a certain amount of mis-selling here because we're trying to sell ai's as intelligent going to replace phds replace this and human beings are going to use the ai's to massively um flex their cognitive capabilities right not replace them this is where everyone's going to be like oh my god i'm going to be like oh my god what's going wrong ai is going to replace science no they're not i mean because science is about problem solving well you actually just made a point a couple minutes ago and i can't believe i've never looked at it this simply it's like the most obvious 30 000 foot in the air point we've had this ai crisis now i'm putting that in air quotes being talked about extensively over i would say the last decade but particularly the last three to where everyone's using it on llms and god knows what they have behind the scenes at darpa maybe you know but like they haven't created their own e equals mc squared yet or anything like that which is make kind of making your point for you like there's not something they have not figured out the laws of quantum or i'm just making up things right now but these things that scientists are constantly trying to test every day therefore not only have they not replaced the highest level guys like you they haven't replaced science in any way at all technically to this point well i would say um people have used ai to come up with very good new ideas for making new drugs folding proteins solving some physics problems but these problems are already well defined by the human that's right right for data processing so the ai's are a great tool they're a tool i don't understand i i think there's something really interesting sociologically happening and cult so culturally and technically happening now um now i i'm not going to geolocate it you can all guess but we have this problem right now where people are saying ai is the ai labs need a lot of money they need a lot of infrastructure they need a lot of energy right and we're saying in academia there is this political um push against academia academia is full of left-wing people who are basically you know don't critically think and all woke and so on therefore let's just replace all academia with ai's new science right now that's just such a fail on all levels sure academia has problems right there's but ideologies and things everywhere but given the ai providers builders don't know what science is right you know they simply don't they're populated by computer scientists and mathematicians now um and they don't and that's not me saying being elitist it's just like solving scientific problems in a wet laboratory whether it's a biological lab or chemistry lab or a physics lab or you're trying to do some mechanical engineering problems are very visceral things right and it requires creation like the governor in a steam engine you know someone's like oh yeah i need why do you make sure i can the boiler doesn't explode and i need to do this thing you know build stuff we we interact with the world now we will be able to build models and whether that we build i'm building a world model for chemistry what does that mean well i'm just learning all the chemical reactions by doing them and then once i've learned them i'll then be i make any molecule that's pretty cool that's i have to collect the data i have to have a verifiable process and then i have to be able to then run it and get it and so i think the science has never been in a more exciting place right and it's it's just a shame that we have this culture war that's going on at the same time because we have to make a decision do we want to spend all this money on cp on gpu cpus water energy whatever to basically crunch the data and give back products to people or do you want to spend the money on humans doing that as well right so it's kind of like a choice you could spend money on how much does it cost to to produce a human that can solve a problem that you can use chat gpt for right like it's there's not magic right you just say well if i want to if i want to replace a human with chat gpt i can but what is the cost and i've got the human out there who's now got not got a job to do well maybe the human will do something more interesting but it's there are so many different things there's many layers maybe we can go back to one fundamental thing we don't yet know what intelligence is we haven't measured it we're using ais to do very important very interesting things at scale and at speed but it's not diminishing a human so you said at the beginning of of when you were explaining this with the intelligence loop you said there's three layers we often talk about intelligence general intelligence and then super intelligence so if i'm understanding you correctly because we can't even measure the bottom layer you were saying it's like 10 leaps and a skip to get to the next layers obviously yeah i mean ag so i think that the the the providers of ai right and i actually like that i like the products they're great right i don't know about your glasses though they were doing some math before you might want to check those things yeah i'm not doing any product uh um promotion on your podcast um so i then but they're not meta glasses yeah but meta might have actually gotten that right not that i'm trying to show for them no no they they worked it was just okay anyway i'm a little off to me well okay um but so let's go back so we say um ai so agi lots of people will say that an agi is um what the term we would give to something that can automate most tasks now is that an agi an artificial general intelligence or is it just an an artificial general i don't know um uh automator so like you know if i it'd be great if i have an ai that can clean up my emails but actually i mean i do use an ai to clean up my emails i use one that's about maybe eight years old and it kind of and what i do is i'm obsessive email cleaner i answer all my emails that i want to answer and i basically file everything and i keep them all and so i just file them and it's a it's a filing system so i i just because then when new stuff comes in it doesn't get lost in the noise right don't look at my emails i get so many emails every day you , it just i find it incredibly depressing because i lose stuff in the noise i need to answer or you know i've only got so much cognitive bandwidth so an artificial general intelligence that the frontier labs are discussing is literally an entity that could just solve a lot of problems right um sorry do a load of tasks does it solve general problems no humans are good at this and i think you know maybe there are some jobs that humans have that are filing but we our failure maybe in um in human society right now as people go from school to university or wherever they go into a job is maybe we need to generate jobs that have more value and meaning right we can do that and ai provides a great chance that now let's go to super intelligence well nick boster made up this term yeah we got off this last time we didn't go deep on this i've read that whole book i'd really like to it means just making up right it's like it's like if look if you can't define a thing and you say it's super i mean i could be a super chemist what does that mean i mean so a super intelligence for me would be to say be somehow that's beyond our current understanding of physics and mathematics like magic again it super intelligence plays on this kind of oh there could be this entity that's way more intelligent than me knows more what does that mean right we human beings are able to discern how the universe works we're able to understand far more than maybe evolution has equipped us with it would seem now what the doomer says well this super intelligence could understand how to you know do things that could basically end humanity or build a super duper weapon or something well i i don't understand the evidence for that so what i try to do is deflate the term super intelligence because i don't know what that means now it could mean let me let me make a take a stab at three different things it could be it's just a faster way of thinking right sure chess computers can do chess really fast so i could buy that but why call it super just fast it could be that it is able to um play through some kind of chain of reasoning um how i can basically look at um decision theory and i could if i plant these seeds and these decisions i can basically create disruption right like i could disrupt a market by let's play plant a meme over here over here over here everyone buys their stocks in a certain way right and i can basically do that but the market is so noisy and and humans are so good at doing weird stuff we couldn't predict that's going to get washed out and the other thing is maybe suddenly it can come up with a brand new thing that doesn't have precedent well we haven't ever seen that you just said there's no evil e equals mc squared so the problem is within with ai we've done the following um and i i think i might have mentioned this before but let me go let's just imagine let's go back to time einstein through and i again i'm not a trained physicist but i'm a pretend physicist so let's go my pretend physics so with special relativity einstein basically asked the question what happens when i sit on a light beam so he basically worked out when he sits on a light beam yeah what happens when he sits on a light beam so he really he started to realize the speed of light if he said the speed of light was a the fastest speed limit in the universe you can't go faster than light what happens then in general relativity einstein said well what happens when you sit on a light beam what if space is a time are curved right or more specifically what if mass curves space time and things don't take a straight line they take a straight line they go through space times it's curved right cool so suddenly when you go use general relativity you're able to go think ah if i fire a satellite into space um the further the satellite gets away from the earth the the the greater the drift in time on the atomic clock on the satellite versus the atomic light clock on earth and in fact if the satellite is putting out a pulse it's clock and i measure it and i can and i compare it with my my clock on earth i can use that to position using gps right so suddenly we knew that before which we understood general relativity before we put satellites into space so when we put satellites into space we understood frame dragging and we could build gps right hold that thought we've built these systems which can basically keep distilling um data and finding relationships that we're basically we're assigning a property to these relationships that we don't understand because we haven't understood the fundamental theory of intelligence in the same way that we don't have it we did just imagine if we start for it it's like science in space satellites in space we didn't have general relativity we're like what the hell they're losing time and we would just made all sorts of stuff up just to basically understand that we're losing time and we were just made all sorts of stuff up understand that so i think the the thing is the frontier labs have got to some kind of incredibly capable um systems that that appear to reason and do things that we didn't anticipate before and that's because we don't have a good theory for intelligence now i like the baseline there of you actually already have something defined so that then you can measure it once you test it with the einstein and testing satellites with gps if i go back to what bostrom did pretty early on here all things considered with how early he wrote that book in in our timeline of ai recent timeline the way i always looked at it was he created a bunch of decision trees so he created possibilities and and i think you're probably i think i buy your argument that there wasn't an underneath definition on that but his decision trees pointed out from a scale of things could be fine all the way to we are like he did have every thing on there it pointed out if this then that or that that that if this then that then that that that that and it created all these different worlds to where you at least i remember i'm reading that book it's a dense it's a dense read but you could see a world where like code gets out of control where some things that he described i wouldn't even make the leap and say this ai became sentient i'm just saying like it was coded to do something again with the mistake of a human being and then i think like one example was it could over create paper clips and cover the entire surface of earth and paper clips and drown us and i see things like that it sounds crazy but at the same time i could see that kind of situation happening if and this would actually go to your argument human beings are not responsible with how they create the code so do you think it's useless if he's pointing out things where we make mistakes and then the ai does things that end us the ai won't do anything the ai is programmed by humans all the decisions come from the human you know this is a thing that people don't understand and this is one of the reasons why i think it's kind of fascinating my my research why i've built a company to make a world model for chemistry and discover drugs and new stuff why i'm basically building engines for chemistry is i want to understand the transition that that we go from physics to chemistry to biology to kind of almost let's say cognition or culture what is happening there we don't really understand it and and i think that i mean the issue i have with the super intelligence is it requires a mechanism doesn't exist the thing i like to say is um let me think of us you know you say you can see the leap if this thing then that thing okay let me say i'm afraid of um uh ag and that's anti-gravity it's like what's ag what anti-gravity is a thing that happens you know when i build a new technology and suddenly it turns off gravity and we all float away right and we all die right because we're not stuck on the planet anymore we have no air nothing so i'm like i put it in your head what about ag should i write a book on on super super anti-gravity that could appear one day sure i could tell you a decision tree if anti-gravity then float right but but what is the mechanism for the anti-gravity it's like it just made i just made some up you know and so the problem is unless you can define something and understand the mechanism paper clips what a nonsense if you flow if you fly on an airplane above the world the most of the world is not covered with machines it is empty space fields trees oceans what do you mean paper clips like he was using a ridiculous example of something yeah but it's it's entirely ridiculous there is no scientific merit in it it is divorced from reality and it it it's just basically so it's divorced from reality that something so powerful could just start to 3d print a bunch of paper clips and put it everywhere it's just basically it's fantastical nonsense and it's science fiction in a in the worst way because he's plays it off plausibly and calmly but i think we have a duty we have a all thinkers nick all of us have a duty to actually criticize our own ideas and think well what is it really it really you know like literally is making shit up it's like i i'm sorry i don't know what else to say other than um we do not understand what human consciousness senians decision making is the the fact that people are going to start saying in a few years that ai should own its own copyright it's just an excuse for people who basically want to take your copyright feed it to an ai jet on a model and then you know if i'm being really really rude about it i'm saying oh yeah thanks whatever company for reading the internet and stealing my ip and then training a model that then i can then and then selling my ip back to other people and then you have all the kind of the kind of you know the the ai pro is going you're just like you just can't accept that um the ai is smart and i'm like no it just stole my ip right this literally just stole my creation and shall i still shall i steal your house is that okay because the ai said so no and but here's the thing we don't understand so there's three things we don't understand what intelligence is right we don't understand what creativity is and we don't understand what novelty is now the fact we don't understand those three things and we're using them all interchangeably right like and i don't understand why it works right so the reason why everything appears to computable is that once something is created right by the world i can then label it and put it in a database i can decompose it but that doesn't mean i can't i don't understand what because i can't predict the future faithfully but i can predict the next token um and sometimes you know if the search space is shallow enough it's going to appear to be acceptable for some eval right but what we're going to see is that my hope is that the way that we um explore um the developments of ais is that we'll understand that what humans are doing are quantitatively different they're in a different universe to what we're doing with silicon compute which is great again i'm i'm i'm not i don't think there's something beyond the material i'm a materialist but similar to roger penrose and i think my collaborator sarah walker many other people we don't know what that material is doing i'm a but i don't know what it is and that's why i'm trying to make chemical brains can you expand upon that like when you say we don't know what it's doing yeah so we i don't understand um how matter is able to process information in space and time we have some models right but there's so much because we don't understand how biology is created by chemistry how do how does evolution produce biology and how does biology then produce consciousness and intelligence and these phenomena um there that we just don't know right there's just so many things we're a really wonderful time in in our existence where we have all these tools we have all this data but we but ai is really good at predicting the past i'll say that again ai is the best at predicting the past because it has the past oh let me qualify ai is very good at predicting the past when it can train on a faithful representation of the past what it cannot do is predict the future because the future is something different so what happens is so the future the past is kind of like a is a probability space right what has happened you can look at probabilities right sorry and um the future is a possibility space so what is a possibility what is the difference between probability bayesian probabilities and any other probabilities you want to use and possibilities and until people understand the difference between those two things you'll keep we'll keep confusing it how do you define the difference well a possibility space is um literally um well it's something that hasn't happened yet a probability space is something that's happened because i can't define a probability on something that hasn't happened yet so what i mean if i take a die and i roll it i know that i'm gonna get one in six i know it's happened before i can train them i can train my own model on it right i know what's happened but i could create a die in my head or i could create a die in my head and i could create a die in my head and i could create a die well on paper probably more likely because i don't think um that you can't anticipate and therefore it's a possibility not a probability and until we understand the subtle difference between those two things we're going to continually keep keeping um uh to miss to mislabel or to misunderstand what ai is actually doing and i think that's kind of you know there's a lot of vested interest a lot of money in saying using in in the kind of trying to basically make this is why ai can never ever ever do science right but ai will be and does today is a tool that i can use to do science yeah it's it's and it's not a rocket it's extra nice rocket fuel i mean yeah i mean and everybody like 99 or even most scientists will argue with me and think that it will say that ai does do science but i mean it's it's a tool that i can use to do science and it's a tool that i can i'm sorry they just don't understand what science is right and it's and science is this science is the ability to identify a problem and then to create a thesis a hypothesis an idea about what that what is going on and then to create an experiment to test now what ai's are very good at is running experiments but if you haven't just if you have not actually correctly assembled the problem statement that all that phds do is a problem is is assemble problem statements that's what we that's why phd doing a phd is so annoying some of my phd students that work for me are like why are you making me think in this crazy way but and it's hard but it's really hard to identify a problem it's like you can be really great student grade a student and then you go to a phd and you find it the most destabilizing thing in the world because i'm asking you to be creative in a space you might not be used to or to identify a problem or an anomaly and how do you identify an anomaly and so i'm asking you to be creative in a space i think a lot of people become really think that the ai's are able to do this they're not they're doing the ai's are doing something really shallow they can't identify anomalies looking at large data sets and finding a hole they absolutely can do that but that's not the same thing how's it not the same thing so it's basically one is the inverse of the other so the ai's are really good at you could use the ai to say take this data where i've already defined the experiment and find an anomaly within that experiment that's great i've already but i've already defined the experiment right what the ai can't do is actually define an entirely new set of experiments they will always define experiments based upon what they know so the right the ai's doing science are a big delusion people are going to go and people will argue with me forever until i get this measurement done right because the ai's are not um are great at you know i i just wrote an article about the ai's and i'm not going to go and say i'm not going to do that i'm sorry i used an ai the other day to write a simulation of the origin of life using assembly theory and i said hey here's what i want you to do here's my here's my assembly theory calculator for molecules let's generate a load of random molecules and join them together and and basically it does a pretty good job it uses some toolkits from from the github puts them together with a code and generates simulate and can generate molecules right and it looks cool but but obviously i'm having to because i was like oh no it's generating molecules and i'm like oh no it's generating random molecules and i might use my chemical knowledge it was generating some absolutely batshit crazy molecules that are not stable allowed and i said no no don't do that remove that remove that adding constraints i curated it to my taste right you had to fix it up and my taste right i was like how did you encode that i was like i could encode it but i'll be there all day but i'm just like don't do that don't do that don't do that it's a bit like i feel like a music producer producer actually like it's like that didn't sound too good i'll i'll be there all day but i'll be there all day but i'll be there all day but i'll be there all day right and we need to train people to use those and that's glorious it's a wonderful thing but we mustn't misunderstand we mustn't use the ai just to do boring science and do pretend science and the proof in the pudding will be in the in the cooking with the ai's right you know when the ai start to produce new theories explain quantum gravity or come up with something that we could never conceive of are we then oh i will be looking out for that and go oh that's interesting and then i'll be there all day and i'll be there all day and i'll be there all day and just why is that ai doing that well my my assertion let's make an assertion it's august 2026 as of today silicon-based computers as we know them are not able creating novelty that doesn't mean to say we will not create a machine that is able to go beyond computation as we know it so all right are you saying we could create something that right now is not something we are labeling ai effectively sure okay i mean the brain is not well the brain is mystical but just because we don't know what the hell is doing but we i mean if you want to create a brain there's the old-fashioned way of doing it right i've got two brains i created one is 20 and one is 18 this week right my two boys right yeah right and they were also created by darwinian evolution going back to luca so we need to understand i'm saying and maybe this is obvious because i'm just like i'm just a boring origin of life chemists. I'm like, I need to create life in the lab before I can understand consciousness. but probably right there is no other way to get there and and i and i think it is a we're making a massive leap to say well let's just make these ais and you know maybe we are entering in a new dark age of science right in like the middle ages where you know witchcraft and everything was allowed and super intelligence all this stuff we're all worrying about this thing and we're and science will actually creative science will stall because the weaponization of science does produce outputs and papers will just go through the roof and everyone will just use llms to write papers they'll use llms to assess the papers we'll use llms to write the grants we use llms to assess the grants and who's gonna have who's gonna be the taste right it's just gonna be it's just then then actually bostrom's prediction of paper clips will come true but in the scientific world and the paper clips will just be papers and grants well it's a stretch from what he was saying but i know but same thing right i mean you know so i i don't think you know i don't think there i don't think there is a but what happens is humans what i'm fascinated by is what happens at the printing press right everyone said it was all over you know we never i think there are some famous examples where people were saying that you know it's terrible writing things down it will take something away from us but actually if it wasn't for our ability to write we wouldn't be able to create what we created so what i'm excited about is what we'll be able to use the ais to create help but sorry what we'll be able to use the ais to help us create right right yeah and and this is where like i think of the common example when you look at say music that ai creates there was a whole stir a year and a half ago or something like that where ai made a song of drake and the weekend that actually obviously two megastars that actually sounded pretty good and people were like oh shit like is this gonna be a problem but it didn't take off a because people learned it was ai and there was something about that that people were like okay the human creativity didn't make this i don't i can't feel the same way about it but the other reason is going back to a point you've been making this whole time which is it didn't make anything novel it took what the types of music those guys had already created and just took that style and said okay make it again so i mean i'll give you a kind of scoop from something i'm writing just now what i will define novelty and and um newness that ais do and try and explain why ais can't do it in principle and where there's an interesting gap so so if you just so if i come up with something novel right now and i say hey here's this novel thing oh that's cool but we'll know full well that we can then label that and put it into a database and then we understand how we got there we understand the pathway of getting there and therefore the probability we get there because now we have a precedent right so that so what happens is that ais can combine things together but the way the combinator the size of the space of combinations for the ai is big but not that big so roughly speaking if a space is big but searchable the ai can do quite good in a shallow space what humans are able to do is literally pluck something out there that's so deep you cannot ever search it with a compute you have available so humans are surfing on the wave of the almost the infinite right possibly possibilities yes and that's where creativity is on that wave and then as soon as they find something they chuck it back and suddenly they go from that infinite edge to the finite encodable present so i would love to i love to put it in this way is that ais basically kind of predict the past they're encoding at the present and the few the interface between the present and the future is where the infinite is it's continue is basically a continuous kind of um uh substrate so when something is continuous it's basically infinite and so you can't in principle know what's going to come and that's why that's where creativity comes from now the thing about the ai is kind of amusing you've got all these people that are pretending to be creative and like that's pretty shallow mate you could the ai could have found that so what's going to happen is like the ai is exposing that a lot of people were pretending to be creative but they're just plagiarizing one another and plagiarism if something exists and you're literally here put it again but make that thing and pass it off okay if you didn't know right because i've done it i invent so many ideas all the time and i'm like oh someone else had that idea it wasn't my idea oh so does that make me a plagiarist no because i didn't basically knowingly take their stuff and pretend it was mine like most of my life i'm basically an not an accidental plagiarist but i'm like i i have shallow ideas just a shallow thinker but occasionally just occasionally have a thought and i'm like oh i'm not a plagiarist i'm not a plagiarist i'm not a well that's pretty good and the depth of that thought is such that it's like oh it's quite novel and the humans are quite good at doing that and we know them there's great artists musicians fashion people just doing all sorts of weird stuff on that are able to surf that edge between what is the present and the future where do you think ideas come from no idea you have no clue well i mean i i well i have something that i'm going to propose um but i i'm it's um well if you were gonna if you if i want to give you a recipe for having a new a novel idea not just an idea where if you say where's another right something creative what you want to be able to do is to make a leap into a space that's so big you could not in principle search it and what humans are really good at is imagining in that space imagination is non-com is not uncomputable because imagination is not uncomputable sorry imagination is uncomputable in principle right because why because it's too big to compute no one says but that's stupid because your brain is imagining i'm like yeah what is my brain doing that's not computable in principle so the human brain i imagination seems to be proof the human brain is doing stuff that is not computable as in computable by a turing machine a counting machine a labeling machine so how are you going to build a brain then if it's something that's not even that that performs tasks that aren't even computable how can you compute in the real world to build that so i build it so i take a physical object i interface it digitally interface interface with it digitally okay in english i basically have i i well i i that's english i i plug it into a digital computer okay right there we go and then the brain is able to come up with imagination that the digital computer could never predict or even conjure because the chemical because the the the size of the space is too big so there's something about the polymer brain like are they able to collapse the interface i don't know well i do know but i can't i have an intuition of how it might work but i'm i'm struggling to put it into um into proper mathematics how long have you been working on this i mean like probably quite a long time i mean and it's been in the back of my head for maybe more than 20 or 30 years oh wow um yeah so we got on this tangent a while ago on ai that was originally coming from the brain and the way you were explaining is after you created all whatever it was 49 tubes where you're getting zeros and ones on off with all the lights you were then taking that and putting that into gels is that how you said that's the next step the next step is to build a brain gel yeah okay right now can we go back to this and explain that some more um sure i mean what i'm trying to do is make a material that um chemically responds so it's sorry make a material where there is processes that are um can be encoded digitally but are and but then become analog so a bit like an oscillation so on off on off tick tock tick tock okay you code it digitally because you you nudge it with a piece of electricity right and then it floats away on its own exactly and then you then read out what's happening later and then i want to understand how that digital encoding and what readout are related and is there a is there a a complex or a linear relationship between the two but um i mean i think to be honest with you right now um the phenomena that we're looking at i don't understand and and i infuriate a lot of molecular computing because what's that well they are using dna so dna has four base pairs and they can then connect that those base pairs almost to a like a computation they can make a they can make a machine a bit like a chip what's called a turing machine it's basically another fancy way of saying a digital computer and they can make a dna computer but i'm like dna computer yeah they've did it i mean darpa darpa funded it fucking darpa man amy jacobson said they were talking to dolphins telepathically in 92 i'm just saying darpa is a funding agency they fund people they give people money and the people do the crazy things have you been to like one of their secret labs they don't have any secret labs i don't buy that that's what i would say if i were funded by darpa i would say they don't sure all right i mean you know i'll ask them to buy me a volcano at some point but darpa maybe darpa based in um in the washington area they're incredibly smart people they have program managers that will and it was all on that it's all it's all out in the public domain, DARPA has a series of program managers. They identify very interesting areas and they fund them. What DARPA does that's exceptional is they have exceptionally smart people who will then basically come up with an idea that if this could work, it would change the world. And the internet changed the world, right? Self-driving cars. So DARPA has a self-driving car challenge, where they had cars going through a desert and they were falling over. But it arguably accelerated a lot of the visual way of using vision and compute together to kind of navigate and robotics. So I mean, DARPA is great. So I don't want to burst the balloon of DARPA, some kind of magic lamp. Will Barron: I think it's a really fascinating place for sure. There's a lot of it that I think a lot of us don't know about. And we just hear about some of the wild projects they work on. Obviously, it's not like when they come to you, Lee, they're like, "Here's all the one fucking billion things we're working on right now." Lee Ngo: They're coming to you for a very specific thing because you have an area of expertise. And they say, "Hey, could you try to do this?" Actually, how open-ended is it? When they approached you with the first grant, were they saying, "We're working on this kind of thing. That's what you work in. Do you have an idea that you can add?" Will Barron: I mean, the way they do it is very collaborative, right? So they'll have a number of different performers that would be funded, and we'd all get together and share and pull stuff. They're trying to push together the boundaries of science. I mean, it's very successful. It's not mystical. The UK has got a DARPA version as well called ARIA they've just brought out, which is the kind of advanced research and innovation agency that they call it. Lee Ngo: And they're cool with you working with DARPA, even though you're a UK guy? Lee Ngo: Sure. I mean, everyone. I mean, look, again, all these organizations, I mean, ARIA will also fund stuff in the US. It's the same way that DARPA has funded people. Lee Ngo: Oh, that's interesting. Lee Ngo: They fund where the best ideas are. I mean, obviously, there's a certain amount of political taxpayer accountability, right? As a taxpayer, do you want to give all your money to someone elsewhere in a different country? Well, if they're building something that's going to be of great use to you and you're the only country that can use it, then sure, right? I think that makes sense. Same with ARIA, based in the UK. Of course, the majority of the funds are spent in the country of origin. But going back to the DNA computer thing, what I was trying to say is there are people out there that are computer scientists thinking about DNA as a computer, and they reduce it to this conventional computing paradigm. I'm suggesting that the brain is not a conventional computer. The brain is capable of doing things that we don't understand, i.e. imagination. I mean, isn't it wild? You can have an imagination. You can imagine a thing that doesn't exist yet, right? And that imagination, that imagined thing has causal power, because you can imagine that thing, and you can make it work. You can make it, yeah. Right? And this is what entrepreneurs do all the time. Isn't it great that we have this, like, "Oh, I want to make this widget." It might be a mobile phone, or I'll make the iPod Nano. I mean, if Steve Jobs came up with it, whoever came up with it. Human beings are uniquely able to imagine a thing that doesn't exist. It just exists in their head, molecules and synapses, and you can literally grab that from the future and drag it into the present. Grab it from the, so specifically from the future. That's why I like to call it, because for me, the future is unpredictable, and is a possibility space. And imagination works in possibility space, not probability space. And then you work backwards. I mean, whoever at SpaceX, whether it's Elon or someone else, came up and said, "You know what? We'll just make the rocket out of steel, and we'll catch it." Because why not? Because we're just going to make something the size of a skyscraper, pretty much, that will take off, and it will go supersonic. And then when it lands down, we'll make it go subsonic. And by the way, the time we catch it, we'll hear the sonic booms. I mean, what? That's nuts, yeah. Yeah. But it's now science fact. And this is why humans are really good at fiction, right? Science fiction, you think about Jules Verne and all these things. It's so fascinating that we're able to do this. And I'm not saying there's something magical. I'm just saying that digital computing is not everything. And the fact is, we're in this fallacy where we think that the entire world is a simulatable entity. It's another thing that Nick Bostrom said, "We're all in a simulation." But that's just basically saying, it's unfalsifiable. And if something is unfalsifiable- How is it. Yeah, we started to talk about this last time, but got off that as well. How is it unfalsifiable that we're in a simulation? Well, where does simulation exist in? You have an infinite regress. All right. What do you mean by that, infinite regress? Well, if I'm in a simulation, great. The simulation has to exist somewhere. Let's imagine where. Let's say I exist in a computer somewhere. Where's that computer? Is it another simulation, and a simulation, and a simulation? So if I can't falsify. A simulation's all the way down, right? Therefore, it's kind of like. It's the same as having a religious commitment, a belief. So if my simulation argument is the same as a religious commitment, a belief, I'm not saying. I'm not saying I can't falsify God, therefore God doesn't exist. I'm saying I can't. It's not amenable to the scientific process. So if something is not amenable to the scientific method, then we don't have to talk about it. And so the thing about the simulation hypothesis is it requires a commitment to a thing that is not ever falsifiable, and therefore it's a commitment of faith. And if it's a commitment of faith, we don't have to discuss about it. In fact, David Deutsch writes about this really nicely, I think, in the beginning of infinity. The simulation argument is a garbage argument, because it is an argument that stems from faith. The part that I wonder if it's actually beyond faith, though, is. Well, it's a couple. It's twofold. Number one, the galaxy, we don't even know how dense it is and how far it could go, and we can only know what we've been able to actually physically observe. And then number two, there are unexplainable things that happen in human patterns, in a way, that would suggest that perhaps we are within, like you said, the layers of simulation. I'm trying to picture in my head why that's not. Okay, no, no, no, no. Look, let's go back. Okay, we're in the universe. Who created the universe? Who do I believe created it? No, no, no. We can say there's a creator, right? Or it just is. But the fact we can't falsify that, it's nice conversation. And sure, there are things that are weird in the universe. Go, "Well, was there a designer? Was there a god?" Sure. But what can we do? What can we do? What can we use a scientific method to explore, right? Yeah, but you said you're not like a Lawrence Krauss guy, that something came from nothing. You believe it started from something. No, I mean, I don't. So, a Lawrence Krauss guy, something. No, look, I mean, I think there are some scientists who basically, again, that something from nothing is, as an argument, is, for me, kind of similar to the simulation argument, right? So, I think that they both have fundamental scientific flaws. And so, I prefer to, as a materialist, to work in the material world and just basically do experiments on the stuff around me. Now, that doesn't mean to say we do not exist in a simulation or something didn't come from nothing. It's just I am not able to build an experiment to basically falsify that. How do we find a way to build an experiment to falsify that? Well, it's not. I don't think it's possible. You don't think it's possible? I think, I mean, my small brain, my small intellect, I am not able to falsify that. Right now. But like, you know, they couldn't falsify gravity in 1400 and then an apple fell on the. Yes, they could. They could. They started. They were throwing stuff at each other. They just didn't know how to falsify it. You know, the principle was always. So, that seems like semantics to me. No, because we knew there was this thing called gravity, and we understood that there was a force. No, no. Look, I think we have to be very. This is where philosophy becomes really important, and I wish I was a properly trained philosopher. Who would say, "Look, if we're going to basically take all the way back, we're going to. We're going to assume there are certain things that exist, an ontology, right? Or a metaphysics, right? And then we're going to basically then look at relationships with things within that metaphysics and ontology, and we put out layers. And those layers are going to have to be self-consistent. And what you'll find with both the simulation hypothesis and the something or nothing is an infinite regress. And with an infinite regress, you can't make progress on that. And so, what you do is you put that to the side and say, "Well, that is something that's outwith the scientific method. Not as defined today, but as defined forever, right?" And that's why I think the simulation argument, the fact we're still discussing it as if it's a serious argument, is silly. Because we can spend our life discussing so many other interesting things, like how do we cure cancer? Or why can't we live forever? Or can we go to Mars quickly using a fusion engine, right? Well, far more interesting questions because we affect them. And also, I think the simulation argument is. For me, simulation is super interesting because I'm building chemistry robots, right? And if I build a robot to do something, and then I build a simulation, I want to be able to verify. I need a thing called verification. Now, in AI world, where the AIs are working really well, they've got very, very good AI systems. They've got very, very good verification in certain problems, right? And so one of the things I'm inspired by actually from AI is like building the correct verification loop for physical chemistry stuff because you know I invented a programming language for chemistry a few years ago and everyone just said this is nonsense you just made it up I'm like well it's not I didn't make it up but I'm not sure if it's nonsense like the idea came to me because I wanted to program my 3d printer to do chemistry and I want to make sure the 3d printer didn't catch fire so then I built this programming language but that allowed me to make a digital twin of it so I can verify and test it in a sandbox and so and so simulation that allows me to verify something in the real world is great so don't so if I can take the real world and then make a make a model of it and then do something that will allow me to check that when I do it in the real world doesn't catch fire I'll do that that's why simulation is so important and that's why I think it's important for me to push back on this whole you know again a nonsense idea of the simulate where we're a simulation but I think it's important for me to push back on this whole you know again a nonsense idea of the simulation but I think it's important for me to push back on this whole you know again a nonsense now that doesn't mean to say this will mess with everyone's head that one day we can't create a simulation where we can put digients inside where we can put what inside so um I've got a Ted Chang I thought you'd say Terrence Howard I was like oh shit here we go Ted Chang wrote a really great book called the life cycle it's not the nicest name not the sexiest name the life cycle software objects I believe the name of the book is Ted Chang Ted Chang fantastic writer is he still with us yeah okay he's a fantastic thinker writer um he's um external faculty at Santa Fe Institute so I've met with him several times cool um debated assembly theory with him um and um and these digients are kind of real entities that live in the world and you can manifest them in physical robots and so on but it's not you know I could imagine a world where I could create a sufficiently rich um computational universe where I could create things that might appear sentient I could do tests on um where I would actually have to think about some moral philosophy ethics and so on you know um I can imagine that but I don't know what physics I would have to build for that because I don't know because I don't understand what life is right what how chemistry became biology number one and how biology generates cognition and consciousness number two and how consciousness makes intelligence and free will number three I don't understand any of those things until I get to the bottom of it I don't understand any of those things until I get to the end of those things I can't build a simulation of them right I got you so I think that that's what I'm trying to get at so it's very easy for people to loosely say I can do a thing but then we have to apply the scientific method and real scrutiny to it you know and that's why Bostrom like I'm I feel like I'm really I'm Bostrom hating he's a really nice guy have you ever talked with him I haven't no no no I mean I think interesting conversation I think I've been at several meetings when he is there but he's kind of you know um I think I would probably just be too annoying I would just be like I would like I don't know I would make the the Bostrom conflabulator conflate confabulator confabulator yeah so this it will be like a philosopher that just puts together the bullshit things and pretends they're real the coffee cup um you know let's think one now let's combine coffee cups in a simulation that could make black holes and destroy the world you know so like what would happen if we simulated the wrong coffee cup in the in this in this uh you know in this alternative universe and it caused a singularity and the entire world disappeared I don't know if he was doing that I don't think he went to that I think he went to where things are coded to create or destroy just in general not like oh we're gonna have fucking floating objects or something like that that defy physics I don't think he quite did that I'm not arguing that maybe there is something to be said that he didn't create something that's falsifiable it's an interesting point I just don't know if he went that far I mean I think look it has a role and I think it got people thinking but I think it's very dangerous because it's allowed people to think there's this thing possible called super intelligence it's a bit like saying we're going to go fast and speed of light right you can't go fast and speed of light we know ever ever it's the law of the universe right as you put energy into a mass and you to accelerate it it it radiates radiation to stop you getting there we do that in proton beams all the time at CERN right there's no like the speed of light seems to be you know I mean never say never but 99.99999 percent so you're saying there's a chance well if I just no there is no chance but but as a scientist it's impossible for me to say anything is absolute because you know I have to have an open mind but right now having putting some limits on things allowed us to build a technological society you know when you go to a hospital and they say well we're going to do an operation on you and you say and we're going to I don't know put a stent in your in your heart right and you can say well you know did you make this up is there a chance well there's of course a chance that we're just making it up you'll die but but actually look at all the statistics we did if people do die but that's part of the but the fact is the probabilities of the past exactly the probability that you can survive if you've got a you know some kind of constriction in your artery it's like it's a it's prevented many deaths so sure you never say never in science you never say anything you just basically go to the edge of the scale and say I'm 99.99999 percent sure we're not going to fasten speed of light because all the phenomena we showed that allowed us to build all our technology it means that when you accelerate objects towards the speed of light they they can't get there now you said we when you referred to CERN are you involved with CERN at all no you're not no no I mean I've been to CERN I was a TED TED talk at CERN but I mean CERN is just like it's a it's you know it's just a very interesting place where particle physicists try and do experiments to confirm what they already know but that's me making a standard model because what's the latest stuff they're working on over there I'm not I'm not call it I'm not a particle physicist right and I'm not I'm CERN is a great machine it probably CERN is a great machine in terms of the the the media associated with CERN the way they drum up interest it's like this massive experiment and it costs a lot of money right and so they have to keep it they want to keep the machine wants to keep itself going you know there is an argument right now in the world in the UK like how much do we want to spend on particle physics the particle physicists are getting a lot of money spent on them to do stuff that basically is you know we've we've we've basically used the the CERN to get the Higgs boson great it was was that worth five five billion euro or dollars or whatever it was I don't know well that seems like it's such a huge part of the these spaces in in any level of academia but especially in science how much can you drum up buzz and hype and I don't know some sort of like for lack of better way of putting it like creative sci-fi interest in the general public to be like oh I want people to work on that versus actually funding the ideas that might actually have the merits of being the best to create something that's actually groundbreaking I'm yeah I think that's a that's a legitimate question right um and I think there's an argument to be so to be say look at look at any any um scientific enterprise when you fund it um you get you get um rewards coming out and then when the rewards tail off what you do you probably kill it and start again right creative destruction so that happens a lot in science but um things you know it's not just CERN right in in chemistry in physics in biology there's all you know was the human genome project worth it well it wasn't worth it at the time it's gonna be worth it now because we now know how I edit the genome can you explain that more yeah so when the human genome project was done it was a massive collaboration between the NIH and uh and the MRC so the UK MRC medical research council and the NIH national institute for health they spent quite a lot of money in basically building technology to human to sequence the human genome and then also Craig Venter um great pioneer great entrepreneur great um a kind of engineer also basically started a company to beat them to do it right because he um the to justify it we said well we're going to cure all disease right and the human genome was solved and we didn't cure all disease what's beginning to happen now which is really exciting is that there's a lot of gene therapies where we understand how to correct a diseased gene like there are some people um but young people and old people that have had a young people have been born blind or almost blind where they've been able to correct protein by gene therapy and they can see that's amazing wow there's also gene therapies where we're understanding how to re reprogram the body's immune system to cure cancer I mean there is a very strong chance that most cancers we know about within our lifetimes well no we've on our lifetime we'll have a combination of molecular and genomic therapies where we'll use small molecules do you think they already have them and they're just not giving them to people no why would you possibly because that's the stupid thing to do why is that stupid we've had the same they've improved some levels of how they treat cancer but we've we've utilized the same type of treatment for it for decades now and it's brutal so yeah and the companies are getting there right it's um I think they're so no there is this is one conspiracy that can't exist well it doesn't exist right why because there's lots of pharmaceutical companies pharmaceutical companies classically a chemistry there's lots of chemists doing medicinal chemistry going way back developments in biology are moving a pace but the most critical problem is We have to translate those developments from the lab into the clinic and people are hard and people die. Now there is actually quite an interesting contrast in China and the US and the UK right now about how much regulation we have and arguably there are some clinical trials going faster in China because of different regulation in the UK and the US and Europe. Now is there an argument to say that there's not conspiracy in the West but we are much more, we're much more risk averse. Right. Right? Yes. So could we go faster if we basically said, oh, okay, we'll accept a few more deaths probably. But that actually is. So any limitation that we have in the West is a function of our regulatory environment, which is in function of our voters and the people. So we're not conspiracy. We're like, no, we don't want to- Yeah. No, it's not always the worst thing for sure. Like you look at the conversations happening around like the ability to clone things and stuff like that. And like China's moved in some ways that are like a little fast and taking risks with that because they don't have the same guardrails on it. I think there's something to be said for having guardrails on that for sure. Yeah. I mean, there was one very famous Chinese scientist who used gene therapy to edit some embryos that became humans and caused a problem, right? These people are not going to have such a good life as others. So he got put to prison because he basically mis-edited the data. The genome. Yeah. What did he do that they're not going to have this good enough life? Oh, I mean, I can't remember the details and I think of something to do with the HIV. Was it something to do with HIV? The virus? But there was. I'm not sure, but there was something he did that was not particularly good, smart. Yeah. Chinese scientists who produced genetically altered babies sentenced to three years in jail. He Jinghui. And his two collaborators were found guilty. They were found guilty of illegal medical practices. Let's see what they did. The Chinese researcher who stunned the world last year by announcing he had helped produce genetically edited babies has been found guilty of conducting illegal medical practices and sentenced to three years. A court in Shenzhen found that he and two collaborators forged ethical review documents and misled doctors into unknowingly implanting gene-edited embryos into two women, according to Jinghui, China's state-run press agency. One mother gave birth to twin girls in November 2018. The court ruled that the three defendants had deliberately violated national regulations on biomedical research and medical ethics and rashly applied gene-editing technology to human reproductive medicine. All three pleaded guilty to a two-year prison sentence. The court heard the case in private to protect the personal privacy of the individuals involved. The report says physical and documentary evidence of witnesses and expert testimony were presented to the court, but it gave no details. Sad story. Everyone lost in this. But the one gain is. The world is awakened to the seriousness of advancing genetic technologies. I feel sorry for JK's little family, though. I warned him things could end this way, and it was just too late, wrote bioethicist William Hurlburt at Stanford University. And then Dave's highlighting this. In November 2018, he announced that he had modified a key gene in a number of human embryos in a way thought to confer resistance to HIV. The modification might be passed on to the descendants of children born with it. He recruited couples. The mother was not. The father was infected with HIV and the mother was not. His talk at the International Summit on Human Genome Editing in Hong Kong, China. He said he wanted to spare the babies the possibility of becoming infected with HIV later in life. The technique could be used to reduce HIV/AIDS disease burden in much of Africa, he argued, where those infected often face severe disruption. But like you said, they kept it private in court, but it obviously caused other serious drawbacks in the kids. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that was completely the stupidest thing to do, right? Yeah. Because HIV is pretty much now. I mean, horrible disease, but fascinating that we have now, it's possible, I mean, I don't know if it will be completely eradicated in our lifetime, but it will be eradicated. And the reason for that is HIV was one of those weird things where it was a leap from animal to human, right? And obviously, it devastated population, mainly homosexual males, right? And then we got therapies. to put it under control and now we've got to the point where you can actually get it under such control there's no viral load which means like it's almost it's not impossible to pass it on and i'm not an expert in this but basically is you could chemically control it and you get rid of the side effects and then now you're at the point where you could actually suppress the presence of the virus what an amazing accomplishment for human medical technology i think he just went a step one step too far and okay are we going to edit do gene editing in the future in ways that we have to debate it's a technology that we have to debate yeah absolutely and you know in the uk we've we've we've done it but anyway coming back to the human genome project compared to cern and pharmaceutical companies is that human gene the human genome project was an incredible achievement in the same way that you know use of cern to find the exposome was the incredible achievement now how we take those projects on in future time and how we fund them and what we tell the public is kind of interesting right um and i think you know science is becoming it can be expensive um we're in this illusion right now that ai labs are going to automate all science so it'll be cheap and we'll just cure all disease and we're gonna have and that's just not going to happen something else is going to happen the ai tools will help us cure some disease they'll help us can um produce new molecules and it might be that it will accelerate rapidly what we can achieve i just don't know right i like your scenario i said this earlier but like in all seriousness i hope to god you're like over the target on this because if it's just a huge accelerant that allows us to solve things way quicker where human beings are still leading the way and creating that intuition to do stuff then this is the opposite of doomsday i think so and i think that's why i can almost have some sympathy i mean i have sympathy for both of you and i think that's why i can almost have some sympathy for both of you and i think that's why i can almost have some sympathy for both of you and i think that's why i can almost have some ai doomers because obviously um they're trying to communicate a scenario in a language that gets people to think and ask their politicians to basically think say hang on can we just understand what's going on and i have sympathy for the ai abundances abundant tests to say let's be optimistic and use these tools in a way that will help human flourishing what i don't like is the fact that the doom you know you can wake up i mean like if an alien visited earth they'd be like what the hell because when you're like we're all gonna die hey is gonna kill kill us and two we're all gonna live forever and we're gonna have infinite productivity we're gonna have infinite stuff both those things are clearly stupid the nuance says well look there is a worry that we'll use ai systems to hack into computer systems and all software is going to be perpetually unsafe bank accounts encryption blah blah blah that's a problem you don't want you don't want your tesla to go nuts on the motorway you know you just normal you want safety and you want security and you want bad people to not do bad things you want them to also be able to stop them on the flip side you want to use ai to accelerate thinking accelerate kind of technology and and basically cure disease um make things cooler you know and but what i think has happened is some of the ai people getting quite rich are saying oh money won't exist in 10 years yeah i don't understand that argument at all that doesn't make sense it's just elon making shit up again it's like i don't understand like i don't know what's going on i don't know what's going on i don't know what's going on like elon is a genius but but he's not a genius at communicating what is what but what i i listened to that a few times and i was like what the fuck is the logic here what how does money how does money not exist to where people are all just going to be the same especially like that i think it's so look i'm not an economist but i would say the following money today you're an economist money is a is a representation allocation of resource right yes and um and where there are people who are deciding on what to do money will be required now isn't it going to be great that the resources required to build certain things will drop and drop to drop almost asymptote towards zero right it's kind of great that i mean think about technologies now that you can just buy and they're just basically almost free right there are some microprocessors you can buy that are just like 15 cents when it used to be many many pounds many many dollars sorry so there's things like that so that the cost of certain goods will get so low that the cost of certain goods will get it's relatively abundant right but that there's always going to be a bottleneck i mean planet earth has a finite size there's a finite amount of accessible energy today we have to be there's a finite amount of physical resource but there's an infinite amount of possibility which is really cool because that infinite amount of possibility we're going to recycle things we're going to find new energy sources we're going to be able to create entirely new economies right there'll be digital worlds where people will be trading stuff and doing stuff and creating you know all sorts of art and stuff so i mean i can't prejudge what's going to happen there but this idea that we've got infinite abundance in in less than 10 years it might be a reaction because quite rightly the people creating these ai tools have been astonished by their capability i mean think about it like you can take these you know the thing i find fascinating is you can use claude or chat gpt to make a powerpoint it's pretty good yeah no it's you can make apps with these things too but the thing is if you tell if you tell claude just make a powerpoint to do x and you don't give enough information it's garbage that's right so the fact is is it that complicated to understand if you garbage in garbage out it's just like if i say oh i don't want to make a powerpoint presentation myself but here are the points i want to make and here's a fundamental data for them please make it and iterate with me i have no problem with that i have no problem using ai tools to basically unleash my creativity right um because i spend i think what i've had to spend some time adjusting to is um the fact that these tools have to be used in certain ways and and you know they a lot of them give me the ick right like when it comes to writing do i oh yeah right do i do i use the ai just to write for me it's shit i mean it's getting better it's still but people can i talk to the average person now and like they'll be they'll look at someone very quickly they'll be like that's ai like the human intuition on that is pretty fucking good so i'm and i just love the way the ai is going they're so um what's the word i think semantically uniform semantically you know i think there's basically there's a the ai is right in such a uniform way yes you can see it so it's you know and also it's kind of this it's not it this it's that it's not a it's b i'm just like can please not write like that right so what i do tend to use is i i write and my writing is fairly flawed but um but you do something flawed my writing no way i might i'm i'm not the i'm not the best trained uh uh english professional but i and i and i try and write enthusiastically but i but i do use the ai now to collect typos but it does try and clean up my grammar i was like no i don't want to say i'm like that i want it sound like this this is my voice right exactly so please don't do that thank you it's very robotic but what i have used which i found quite fascinating is i use the ais now to look at all my paper proofs because paper proofs so when i publish a paper and i've got the proofs and i i'm really bad i i'm really bad at reading right i i find it hard to read in a way that allows us to correct typos so i i had this paper that came out in pns just a few weeks ago on alien detection systems alien detection systems you can find it online if you think assembly theory for um i don't know what it was alien detection or something or life detection um and um i put the proofs into chat gpt and said just fight expecting it just to and it went through a bunch of typos and i found like 10 typos i did not find like you know it's useful yeah like it was like really typos a human a human reading it would find it annoying right and and and what i want to do is make there we go this is the paper in pnas molecular assembly is a universal biosignature measurable by mass spectrometry now can you bring that from japanese to english just to put what you mean oh oh okay sorry from from english to english yeah um so that's a kind of english and we speak here in jersey so so what this paper does it show so it's basically latest extension of assembly theory for detection and what it just says is like hey how can i take a molecule so if i how can i measure a molecule the presence of a molecule on another planet and use a measuring device to tell me if that's produced by biology or not an alien biology or meaning intelligent life not intelligent life just any life evolve any life the presence of evolution we can tell intelligence as well actually on the same scale as we can tell what i'm getting to i think we can measure intelligence it's just that so and then we just if if you go down if you scroll down there's a great figure which my student made because i use machine can i read the can i read the abstract before we scroll down yeah is that right let's go back up to the abstract or the significant statement which one do you like better significance or abstract um read the abstract let's read the abstract so detecting life beyond earth requires biosignatures that do not depend on the chemistry of known organisms molecular assembly ma derived from assembly theory which to be clear you've mentioned this today this is a theory you have come up with you talked about it last time but we'll get deeper on it i'm sure now quantifies how difficult it is to build a molecule from basic building blocks linking complexity directly to selection and evolution here we show that ma can serve as a universal biosignature that is both interpretable and experimentally measurable unlike information theoretic measures ma can be inferred directly from mass spectrometry data without structural elucidation we demonstrate that using a machine learning model trained on standardized signal stage spectra which predicts ma with three-fold level error than baseline methods simulated multi-stage data reveal that small instrumental variations can double prediction error highlighting the importance of calibration these findings establish molecular assembly as a physically grounded quantifiable biosignature measured by mass spectrometry whose interpretation depends on a careful control of the instrumental effects offering a scalable route to life detection on future planetary missions so dave let's go down to where lee wanted to expand upon this with the with the graph i just like that i just like the picture with it so it's kind of nice with um because obviously he says um you can use machine learning because there's a theory there right so the the thing is people have been trying to use machine learning to look for life and they were just making shit up and assembly theory just helps you understand the basis for it so all it to go back to my analogy for temperature right temperature we know things are hot or cold but how do we quantify we know things are live or dead we know something's wiggling around and moving or it's dead it's a stone or we just killed it boom how do we measure it so all the assembly theory does it says well look living systems uniquely this is the only assumption this is the only assumption it is an assumption and we're trying to falsify it and it's falsifiable so you living systems uniquely make molecules with many different parts right and um in high copy number so we can measure that so we've made them it's equivalent to our thermometer we have a thing called a mass spectrometer what a mass spectrometer does is able to weigh a molecule how heavy it is so it basically fires a molecule into a vacuum electric field and just measures how much how heavy it is and then it hits it you hit it with energy and it falls apart and the way it falls apart yeah you just break the molecule part you hit it and just it's a bit like taking a plate and hitting it on the ground and fragments right and then you count the number of parts and that parts you can then um use that to measure the actual assembly index that we can theoretically calculate and this was a leap i made a few years ago i realized that assembly index was measurable and calibrated it and caused and that was and this paper is the next step to say well hey not only does it work we can now put it onto mass spectrometers a mass there's a mass spectrometer on mars right now in fact there's three on mars uh i don't know if there's one on the moon there have been put in in other places and we're sending a nuclear powered mass spectrometer to titan called dragonfly it's quite cool that's a hard name i like that so basically it's a quadcopter it's going to be powered by a plutonium slug a nuclear battery and it's going to fly around titan and sniff the air and it's got a mass spec on it and i'm like guys use assembly theory to see if we can find life okay so let's expand upon this could this be maybe i'm going to go way too far with this can you do any of this to try to find life on like exoplanets and things you can so there's a paper that's going to be coming out soon where we can use assembly theory to um to detect to measure the probability for life on an exoplanet for sure now whether it will work or not we don't know yet but this paper is going to come out in a few months i don't want to say much more about it because my co-workers have been working on it walker and her team at asu have you talked to david kipping about this yeah yeah yeah i've mentioned it to david kipping yeah what does he say um he's excited i mean he's an enthusiast for this type of stuff yeah um i think that the the problem is not with david kipping but just the exoplanet world in general is they they're very used to the used about talking about one marker for life like methane which is ch4 okay or oxygen o2 or water h2o so these are all very small molecules so these molecules themselves don't carry enough information if to know the difference between um life and death whereas the system that we've built using assembly theory is able to kind of print fingerprint these gases in a way but uh i'm sorry can you explain that some more you lost me a little bit so when they're looking at those individual so if yeah so on methane has been detected on mars does that mean it's life or not no because a geological process could be producing methane oxygen has been detected on exo well oxygen could conceivably be detected on the exoplanet does that mean it's a presence of life because oxygen is made by photosynthesis on earth no because oxygen is simple you could you could get it by just breaking water down in uv light right so the question is how can you um for the presence of biology or evolution in using gases and the answer is going to be assembly theory meaning maybe i'm making a leap here that's totally wrong but you can instead of looking at individual variables like that you're combining all them along with other factors to put it all together and determine if there's life yeah i mean you don't have to use other factors you just combine them together so all i'll say for now because again it's you know has to be peer-reviewed and i'm i'm what i i you know i do many things um but presenting scientific findings before they're being peer-reviewed as if they're accepted findings is a trap one doesn't want to fall in to but what i can tell you is i published a paper a few years ago where i was able to show you can measure assembly index in that in the lab using three techniques a thing called mass spec which i just said is weighing molecules one called nmr which is called nuclear magnetic resonance a bit like mri right that you but um for molecules and the third one's called infrared using infrared spectroscopy and light now how would that work so that you just basically you just look at the number of different colors so the more complex molecule the more colors it has right and so and that and so conceivably you could imagine exoplanets having molecules lots different colors sure so now are aliens something you thought about like as a kid just as an idea a lot like man there's got to be life out there i wonder what it looks like or i mean as a kid i mean was i thinking about aliens a lot i mean not obsessively um i was probably thinking about why am i here why does life look like this and i was thinking about why am i here why does life look like this and i was thinking about why am i here why does life look like this and i was thinking about why am i here why does life exist how can i how can i take this thing apart i mean but i think obviously now um understanding what life is um i think is is really critical for understand the phenomena of life on earth is going to for sure tell us about aliens how so well what is life as a phenomena right as a chemical phenomena and then if we understand how how how odd is it that is earth that has life right um and how um rare might life be in the universe it kind of related so if we can work out the process that gives rise that gave rise to life on earth we should be understand something about the process that could give right to life in the universe let me let me give you an analogy um the if we let's just imagine we could when we looked up in the sky at night we we did not see anything and we were like oh my god anything except during the day saw our sun because there was no other light getting to us we just see it's black um we would obsess about the sun right how did the sun get created we know the sun is created by the collapse of hydrogen and what happens is hydrogen get collapses go its own gravity and the point at which the gravity is dragging all the hydrogen together what happens when gravity pulls the hydrogen together gets hotter so there's a point where it gets so hot it's enough to overcome a strong nuclear force and then it's starting to go in fusion and then when it gets so hot it's enough to overcome a strong nuclear force and then it's starting to go in fusion and then it's starting to go in fusion if the gravity is enough it doesn't blow apart it it kind of self-regulates right because some start stars could just blow apart so that phenomena that gives rise to the sun um is um is gravity now let's look in this now let's take our universe we can see stars everywhere in the universe we don't just know our sun you can see stars coming into existence and exploding all the time right well not all the time i don't know what the frequency of supernova is and i don't know what the frequency of supernova is and i don't I think maybe one a month, one a day, I don't know. We'll accept it. So you can see them. So we only have an N of 1 for life on Earth. So if we can start to understand how lightly we think it is chemically that life emerges on Earth, we can start to bound the probabilities. I'm sorry, how can we do that if we don't even understand how vast and big the full galaxy is? We do understand how vast and big the full galaxy is. You mentioned that earlier, and I kind of – I mean, we can measure light from the Milky Way, and we can estimate the size of the Milky Way. But can we estimate what might be on the other side of that? That's what I mean by that. Like how much do we not know what a speck we are? I mean, the universe is pretty big, and we do have some bounds on what we call the light cone of the universe, right? Yeah, the universe is the term I should be using. I'm sorry, not galaxy. Yeah, okay. Universe, that's my bad. Oh, all right. Now I understand what you mean. All right. Fine. Let's just look at the universe for a second. When you look up at every star, every star looks like it has some planets around it, which is pretty crazy. And if you think about it, let's classify those planets. Those planets are either dead and will never have life on them, abiotic but have the possibility for life, number two. Number three are alive. They're just living. There's stuff everywhere. Living and technological, i.e. there's intelligence there, so there's technology there, and post-biology or post-lifology, because let's say biology is unique to Earth, and there's just technology on there, so it's kind of outgrowing it. But arguably. Just technology on there. It's like robots and stuff. I don't know. I just made that up. So there's kind of six type of planet types. So when you look up in the sky, each one of those planets can be one of those six. It can't be anything else, right? I think I've classified all the possibilities. So wouldn't it be good if we could build a telescope? Big enough to shine light on them. Now, according to assembly theory and chemistry, I think that life is probably only possible within a certain zone of temperature. Too hot, and all the bonds fall apart, and you can't have biology. Too cold, nothing happens, right? Right. But actually, I thought of an idea, actually, listening to David Kipping's podcast. He has the Cool Worlds podcast, is that right? So I was listening to that, and they were going on about the habitable zone, and I realized they were wrong. I realized that planets. Living planets can probably modify the Goldilocks zone. Okay, can you please explain that? Yeah, so planet Earth starts to, after the late heavy bombardment, where there's just lots of. It starts to cool down, and the atmosphere is being filled. There will be feedback processes whereby the planet will probably attempt to regulate its own temperature. So it's a bit like the Gaia hypothesis from James Lovelock. Okay. And I realized that, actually, if life starts to form on a planet, and within that zone of life support, if you like, for that biology, like temperature and pressure and whatnot, if the planet starts to drift outside of that, evolution will start to kill stuff, and the stuff will start to respond and go, no, I don't want to die. I will counter that. So like a thermostat. Yeah, rebalance it, yep. So I think that planets might even lock into a biological or lifeological, I just made that word up again, framework where it self-regulates. The planet itself. Yeah. So the planet is able to basically self-regulate for the emergence of life. Okay, let me play this out. This might be totally off-base, but if a scenario existed where a planet was traveling around its star, its sun in a certain way such that it was getting closer, closer and closer to it and heating the temperature beyond where life could be, are you suggesting that the planet could adjust? I don't even know how that would make sense scientifically, but could adjust not moving closer to the sun in order to be able to survive at a lower temperature? So I think pre-intelligence, no, post-intelligence maybe, we'll go back to that in a moment, brings up one of my favorite Chinese sci-fi movies, Wandering Earth. The Wandering Earth? It's a brilliant movie. Okay. They basically, the Earth is going to be engulfed by the sun, so they're like-- Deep, you don't know that one? Deep knows every movie I've ever made. There's two, there's also Wandering Earth 2. Okay. Come on, you don't-- I'm in, I'm in. It's a fact, like, you know, I didn't think that Chinese sci-fi would be a thing. Oh my God, am I so wrong? I'm just so like-- Oh, they're cooking on sci-fi. Brilliant. Wow. Absolutely fantastic movie. Good to know. Anyway, but, and that's the excuse where Intelligent Life was like, well, we need to get away from Earth, the sun, because the sun is getting too big, and it's slingshots around Jupiter, but I won't give too much away. It's a batshit movie. It's awesome. But no, so let's say, let's talk about, let's say the sun, so the star, sorry, the planet is moving around the star, but it moves around such that it gets closer and very hot, maybe not habitable, and further away it gets too cold, uninhabitable. That's right. I bet you it'll be able to regulate the pressure and the temperature, the atmosphere. So wouldn't it be, wouldn't it be great if like, oh, it's getting, getting too hot. Atmosphere becomes deflective, shields up, oh, we're moving far away, turn the atmosphere to trap light in, shields down. It could do that? Why not? It's just an oscillation. If the chemistry can respond in, in, in, this is what the Earth does now. So we talk about runaway climate change now. I know, but here's what's crazy. I just made it up a few weeks ago when I listened to his podcast. No, but it's not, but it's not even, I think it's a good idea. I've just never thought of it that way, thinking with Earth, like the Earth itself as like a, has its own brain as an organism. I mean, like the, everyone's like climate change is such a problem. It's like not for life. It's not like the Earth is going to get greener because there's more light, there's more heat. It's annoying for humans because we're built, we're, we've urbanized around, you know, around the coast and around the equator where it was, the, the, the zone was quite right for agriculture, but Siberia is going to become really fucking habitable. Right? You're going to have to get some notes on that. Get some new prisons, I guess. I mean, and Siberia is like, but on this time scale of a few hundred years, I will be buying real estate in Siberia. It's going to be great. All right. So people don't really understand. It's like, we're kind of like, oh, doomsday climate change. No, annoying because people are going to die from heat, you know, from overheating, for lack of water, having to shift and migration. That's really bad. We'll probably come up with some technological solution for climate change, but planet, the planet is a pretty big organ. organism is the wrong word, but it's a pretty big. able to kind of respond so i think again looking at these planets in the in the sky they'll they'll have an incredible amount of dynamics will probably home in on life because life produces more complexity more adaptability so maybe the most interesting planets i'm gonna maybe earth is going to survive longer than it otherwise would have because it produced life that's right wow i mean be so cool i mean i think we're looking at life all wrong and you know and actually this is one thing elon says i mean elon says such a creative things but look if your son needs to lose mass so it doesn't explode something bad doesn't happen to it i'm sure a life form could say i'll just take some mass from the sun the other thing i would how would that oh i don't know just make a vacuum cleaner how hard is that i mean look let i mean over a billion years so look over the next five billion years the sun is going to get larger right right now the climate change we've got now is nothing the sun is going to get larger as its hydrogen gets depleted and it starts fusing heat more helium and it's going to get and it's going to get more and it's going to get a bit hotter now what do we do to solve that problem i mean the wandering earth is a bit of extreme version i would just like hey we've got like a couple of billion years notice can't we just push the earth gently that way how hard is that just put a few nukes boom boom and like you'll just need to shift it a few millimeters a year that's it it's not hard just find a desert if you have two if you have two billion years notice and you want us and you want to it's not hard i don't disagree with you considering the technological innovation we have on very short time scales for sure i mean like there's ways we can play with the gravity like what do we do the moon i mean look i'm not saying that we can do everything but if we understand the mass of the earth it's finite but it's large but finite there's all sorts of things we could do we could go and drag another planet near us near us and just push it out a bit again given two billion years right we can do a lot you know planning ahead i gotta get you and david in here for a podcast together he's coming back in in november we're gonna do one but maybe next year all right he's here like he's in town we can make that happen i didn't realize you chat with him i guess make yeah he's he's awesome but that would be really cool to like exchange ideas i love that you were listening to that and just i listened to it i was like yeah no i need you to say that to him and the two of you go back and forth because he's also like what i love about his style is he is number one incredibly open-minded but also like when he's challenging other scientists ideas with data you know he's just looking at it by the evidence and he's like hey here's what we're seeing could be that i feel stronger about this but if they prove this then maybe that actually end up being right but right now we can't prove that so i'm here he's very diplomatic about it yeah yeah he's a worrier he's a worrier he's a worrier a warrior or a worrier not a wow i mean a war i don't i might be a warrior okay the accent's killing me but he's a worrier and and that and i think that yeah it's kind of he worries a lot but that's okay everyone everyone does it differently they all i like to be more provocative than not and not worry because then you can really i think for science to accelerate sometimes you need to annoy each other yes because if then it just stops because people get too comfy but maybe ai is going to solve that problem anyway because the ai is going to say no don't be boring it's going to make us all a lot more creative well you're a no bullshit guy that's what i respect you're like the minute you hear something that's like what the fuck is that you're completely unafraid to bring out the fist and be like stop stop well i mean i'm so you need three components for that or i guess you need to be um somewhat um uninhibited by people pushing back right and be and then and all of a sudden you're like oh my god i'm not Also, you need to be willing to be wrong. And then the other thing is you need to – critical thinking, real-time critical thinking requires – basically, I would – I'm sure there's many things I've said today that are actually wrong. But if someone can educate me and say, well, why that's wrong? Like, can we make ASICs that aren't used just with zero and five volts? Are there variations? Can we make neuromorphic computers? That'd be great because I'll buy one and play with it. I won't have to make a – plug a, you know, a gherkin into the mains, right? And so I think that having new ideas and being able to challenge those ideas almost like in a sandbox, right, or whatever in your mind, imagine them, and then create new things is kind of interesting. And I think a lot of people – we're mysticizing, if that's a word, AI, right? We're revering it because we've been told it's magic. It is quite interesting. I do think, though, going back to AI. And it's the only thing I'll say on it before we can talk more about assembly theory is that something did happen. Open AI did – they basically hit upon a cognitive treasure trove when they trained their model. And suddenly these chatbots started to be really good at predicting the next token. And as you increase the context window, it got even better. And then when you basically built kind of guardrails or chain of thought abilities, suddenly these systems were able to daisy chain together. Daisy chain. Daisy chain. Daisy chain. Daisy chain. Yeah, just basically say if this, then that, then this, then that, da-da-da-da. And then you checked everything, fact-checked within, and suddenly these tools became incredibly powerful. But for me, it's like, meh. I wanted my computer to do that since I was nine years old. There was no physical reason it couldn't do that. It's just programmers were rubbish. You have finite memory. Or programmers were too good. I don't know. So I think that AI is – we've got to demysticize it. And that means that we have to start saying – well, what is intelligence? What is creativity? What is novelty? And I'm really asking these questions and stop pretending the AIs are. Because this is where humans will – you know, until we understand how – what life is and create new brains and things, humans still have a job. And isn't it – and maybe there is an argument for kind of saying, well, there are some silly things we can automate. You know, my company, I have this company that – Chemify. Chemify. And Chemify's got a few – Chemify's got a few hundred people in it now. Oh, wow. And I was at a meeting where a load of people were saying, well, you know, I've been able to shed all this number of people from my workforce. And I was like, guys, what are you doing? Like, not only you're basically – you're getting rid of people because you want to temporarily increase your profitability, but actually, look at the human race. We have fantastic – human beings are fantastically flexible, infinite problem solvers and infinite creativity machines. So what you want to do is you want to employ more of them, not less of them. If you're giving them a stupid job because you're stupid, that's actually – don't be stupid. Yeah. Didn't you come up with assembly theory you were telling me with like your finance guy? He was a finance guy at the time. Yeah, yeah. He was able to do that with you. It's like no one would ever think something like that could ever happen, but you have to be even open in the situation of that possibility. I mean, so I do – I find the whole – I find the whole job displacement theory rather distasteful, but I also do find the fact that in the world, in any organization, you've got to – I'm in my company. You want to make sure you don't break the law, and you've got to have good working practices and good regulations, and there's data protection things and all this stuff. So you want to have all of this, but I've hired a lot of people to do incredibly creative things, and also we're building this thing as we go. I mean, Chemify. Chemify's aim is to build a world model for chemistry. What is that as Ligon for AI? I mean, it's kind of – no, and it's not a joke, but it's like the world model for chemistry. In fact, if you go on the web, if you go to chemify.io and slash Genesis, it explains the world model. I built this landing page myself. Genesis? Chemify Genesis, yeah. Chemify Genesis. That's some biblical shit right there. Well, that is because – and it's called Genesis on purpose because – It's the world model for chemistry. If you go down, yeah, you can go down and you can see, okay, keep going down. The molecule on the screen is only a hypothesis. S, make, test. So the idea is that Genesis is about the fact that people think that drug discovery is discovering a molecule. This is actually the answer to creativity and novelty. It is? In AI. Yeah. This is why a chemist is able to come up with it. Okay. So in the old. In the old days, the way you did drug discovery is you would basically just look at – go and get plants and things and look at the molecules and discover molecules that look like they have some kind of interesting microbial activity or biological activity. So you would discover the drug, right? Okay. Now, if you think about chemical space, chemical space typically is said that chemical space is about 10 to the power of 60, right? Okay. So that makes for drugs. So that is if the average drug – the space of possible drug molecules is about 10 to the power of 60. The number of atoms in the universe is 10 to the power of 80. I actually redid that calculation. It's not 10 to the power of 60. It's 10 to the power of 117. Now, how do you arrive at that? It's fairly technical. It's on the archive, actually. Okay. So if you – I don't know what you would put on there for it. It's like size of chemical space, Cronin X archive or something. You might find it. Size of chemical space. Yeah. So you showed the work. My high school math teacher would be proud. Yeah, there we go. Is that it? Elucidating the size of chemical space with assembly theory? Yeah. Okay. Wow. So we looked at the number of steps you would take. So basically, if you allowed your molecule to have, I think, 25 steps, if you click on the PDF or go up in the right-hand corner, I think it is, yeah, there you go. And I think if you go down to the table, there's a table. I didn't think I'd give everyone a chem informatics thing, but keep going down. There's a table with the numbers in, and there's some pretty big numbers in it. Keep going. The biggest numbers. I was going to do a trumpet. Right there. No. No. I think you have to go up now. Sorry. You went too fast. Too fast. There's a lot of pages. I know. A lot of math as well. I'm sorry. It looks smart. It looks. I'm trying to give you something, Lee. Yeah. It's just math. I don't know where it is. The table might be further down. I can have a look. Maybe go to the back of the paper and go the way to the front. I'm at the point where I'm ready to take it. There we go. I was going to take your word for it. And then zoom in there. And then you can zoom in. Oh, look at that. Yeah. There's the number. And then you can look at the assembly index. Yeah. So assembly index 25. That is if you take a random walk, and you take 25 different steps with the chemistry that's available, there's 10 to the power 117 molecules accessible. Right? Now, there are some duplicates, and there may be some that are impossible because the laws of physics, right? And we've tried some filtering there because the referees are arguing about this just now. But that's a really big thing. It's a really big space. So when your space is so big you cannot search it, you have to hop there somehow. How do you do that? Well, you really have to generate something new, right, or novel. That's where genesis comes from. If it's just searching, it'd be like a search engine. So that's why, basically, I think on the genesis, if you go back to the genesis thing, go up, I think if you go up, I don't know where it is. I might have made a statement, but go back one. Go back one. And I think it's like. So not a catalog, not a synthesis sore, not a retrosynthesis, it's a computation. One executable loop wired to real chemo farm capacity ideas to verified matter. Yeah. And so the idea is to say the space is so big you can't search it, so you have to generate it. You have to really make it. But if you go back to the beginning one, sorry, the hallucination, I loved it. I was A/B testing it with a friend. It was like. Chemical hallucinations, that's hard. I love it. I like it. I made it. And everyone's like, "Oh, your marketers wouldn't like it." But at least people know I didn't use an AI to create the carousel. That's right. That's right. Because at the end, if you go to the end one now, the meta, right? Because I like the meta, because computation is. We're drowning in meta molecular? So the future of chemistry is making the meta physical, right? People say, "Oh, that's meta." Yeah. They're like, "Oh, the joke isn't that highbrow. That's metaphysical." But now let's make the meta physical. Okay. You're like, "Get a new job, Lee." Yeah. I don't know if that was as funny as you'd. You got a good sense of humor. I just don't know if that was your type of. Anyway, I did it. I put it up there. But the point is that the Genesis engine creates molecules. It doesn't discover them. Because you can't discover something if the space is too big to search. You can only create. And that's kind of weird. And that's the same thing with AI. Right now, all the AI's generate. So there's all these people doing drug discovery, but they're just generating random graphs on the screen. They can't make them. So people go, "Oh, I've discovered a drug or a new battery molecule." I'm like, "What do you mean?" They say, "Well, this is what I got out of my simulation." I'm like, "Oh, great. Have you got it working?" They're like, "Oh, no. We haven't made it." I'm like, "Well, that's just bullshit then." So basically, I realize, because what Chemify has been doing is making molecules in the hard world for hard chemists. And then you've got the AI world, they're just generating just bullshit. And Genesys connects the two together. And now I'm excited because people are like, "Oh, so you can connect our AI to your engine and we can have a dual AI?" And we're just, "Yes." And so what we're doing now is Genesys is a forward-deployed kind of Chemify engineer that connects people who buy it so they can just use it. They keep their IP. But anyway, I won't sell the company on your podcast. It's just. No, you can sell it all day. That's why you're here. Raised a lot of money, too. Yeah. Employing a lot of people, too. I like that. I mean, we haven't raised. I'm kind of sad that I'm such a bad fundraiser, right? Such a bad. You raised 70 million since the last time you were here. I feel like that's pretty fucking good. But then look at all these AI things that have raised hundreds of millions, right? Yeah, that's all right. That's all right. But then one of my friends was saying to me is that comparison is a thief of joy. That's right. When you were. Were you like into art when you were growing up? Were you an artist of any kind? No, I'm into art now, though. You're into it a lot. I'm into it a lot now. Yeah, yeah. Because when I hear you talk, and there's other scientists I've thought this about as well who I've had a chance to talk to, you remind me of the way you look at things and the way you're visualizing things in your mind and trying things is very similar to how a musician describes making music or how a painter describes painting something or how a sculptor describes sculpting from one slab of marble. It's a very, very similar, if not the same wavelength. Yeah, yeah. Have you ever thought about that? I think so. I mean, I think there is a certain amount of. Because genuine creativity can't just emerge from you applying some rules. Yeah. Right? I was. And I think there is something to be said for how to create. I'm very interested in how Genesis works. It's going to work. And the nice thing is I built this chemi farm in Glasgow and I just connect. I'm just going to. It's like, think of it when Nvidia built its first H100s and put them into racks is literally what we've done. So we're just going to set up that capacity and then we're going to use that to make the next capacity. And then basically every single molecule that we invent will basically be invented much faster because of this. So all pharma, all batteries, all catalyst companies, anyone who deals with chemistry will need it. You see it coming together. Because what happens is every time we do a reaction, we get faster because our world model gets better. Then what I had to do is I had to figure out, because I was trying to sell this, but all the organic chemists were great. Partners kept giving me molecules that were too hard to make. Because if you think about it, Chemify's library, do you want to know how big Chemify's virtual library of molecules make? How big? 10 to the power of 40. That's large. That seems big, but actually, the actual chemical space is about 10 to the 117. So when anyone comes to me and go, "Can you make this?" And we're like, "Shit." "Can you make that?" "Shit." Baby steps. We're like, "Can you make anything? Can you just. Can you instead. Rather than. Rather than. Yeah. I mean, rather than you picking molecules that you want us to make, because we can make all of them, but it takes time. So we've got this virtual library. It's not a catalog. It's not even that. It's so big. It's a procedurally generated process, which allows us to compute. So compute is our verification process. If it computes, we know we can make it for real tomorrow. Right. That's really awesome. So what we do is, rather than you giving us a molecule. And hoping to get lucky, it's a bit like going, "I'm going to take a shot. You've got 10 to the 40 possible targets. I'm shooting in the space of 10 to the 117. You're always going to fail." But if you say, "Oh, is one of those 10 to the 40 possible targets good enough for my drug idea or my catalyst idea?" The answer is then yes. Yeah. And suddenly when you flip it around, but then they don't want you to own the design. So I designed Genesis. It's like the way the UK does its biobank. So basically people buy Genesis and they keep all their IP. So I'm able to federate the data. Oh, I see. Okay. So basically when they bring in their question, their question is probably the most valuable thing. You can answer this question. And so basically I built an AI that takes their question, encodes it, gives them physical matter back, allows them to do it quickly. So basically I think I've just built the. Yeah. The most valuable engine for chemistry ever. And that's cool because that gives them retention on their own stuff. They keep talking. So basically then Chemify gets faster at doing chemistry, but no one ever knows what they're doing. That's right. It's completely encrypted and segregated forever. Wow. And that's the way the UK biobank does it. Because what you want to be able to do, the way the biobank works in the UK is like, we had this problem where, let's say as a patient, you go and say, "I want to know what is the best treatment for me." And you're like, "Great." Yeah. So we'll interrogate the biobank. We're going to put your data into the biobank and you're like, "Oh no, I don't want people to know. I don't want my insurance company to know." And they're like, "No, no, what we do is we basically encrypt it and strip away your personal data and just put it into the space." So your characteristics are in the space and queryable, but you, and all the everything associated with you, can't be reverse engineered. You're like a lesser version in a good way of like a Swiss bank, but for chemistry. I'm not going to say that. My investors are like, "I'm a launderer." But no. I think I'm cooking. I think. So I will. You can. No. But sure. Okay. All right. Real quick. I got to go to the bathroom, but we'll be right back. Yeah. Me too. After you. I'll go after you. When you look at what you're doing, when you look at the scaling, regardless of the argument over sentience and all that. But when you look at the scaling of tools like AI and the abilities that humans are able to leverage now to be able to figure things out at such an exponential rate, do you ever worry about the. about the incoming. abilities of us to potentially start playing god on something no i want to play god in fact i love playing god i mean look we've got we've got mobile phones we have drugs we have cars i mean i want flying cars where's my flying car we've got robots i don't think that's playing god i think the chinese doctor you talk about though that's where it gets to like you can be playing god i think no i think playing god if you like is taking any scientific and what was it was it isaac asimov that said you know any when any scientific magic yeah yeah so so when science can do that science does it a lot imagine going back in time with a mobile with a fully working mobile phone satellite system everyone be like what right and then here's a face here's a face of my mate mate around the world i'm facetiming him what what um so we are playing god now i think that what we've got to be able to be very good at is making sure that humans are flourishing and thriving and what does that mean that you want the average human being on planet earth to be happier to be more um content or whatever it is to be more excited to be contributing to the flame of consciousness or whatever it is so that humans continue to kind of do more and more things and build a technology that makes everyone's lives better and yeah and we're doing that i mean by any measure human beings have never had a better time on planet earth than planet earth ignore polarized social media it says we're all doomed and it's like yes there's climate change you know what we're going to fix that it's not going to be that hard at the end of the day we'll shut we'll shove a load of sulfate in the atmosphere and we might get it wrong and overcool a bit of acid rain and then we'll add some base i mean some people will die well no i think that look but less people will die right right now here's a here's a quandary we have all it we're burning all this fossil fuel most of the fossil fuel we're burning is to create fossil height is to create ammonia to feed the world that's creating global warming that global warming is causing stress um but there are more people alive today because of technology than ever lived and if you didn't say oh no we feel so guilty this is why the climate climate people are kind of like annoying me saying we should like go and live in caves i'm like who are you gonna who are you gonna starve to death tell me which half of the population you're gonna kill so sure if we attempt geoengineering and we create some accidents along the way if that saves billions of lives and we basically 50 people die of i don't know a thing unforeseen then do the calculation but what about like the genetic engineering and where that ends we're genetically engineering rice right now in fact if it wasn't no no that's not that's not what i mean well maybe but that's not where i was going with that like when you look at what the guys at i like them i've had ben and matt on the show i don't know what they are they are the bioscience company out of texas that is recreating extinct species so they made a version of the dire wolves so they tell you so they tell us yes but to be clear like they're they're honest about this part they made a version of the extinct dire wolves that's based on gray wolf dna which gray wolves still exist and share some sort of familial bond with dire wolves so they didn't create like a perfect dire wolf but like when they're looking at maybe creating something that is not evolutionarily but is somewhat similar to say a woolly mammoth part of why they're doing this is because woolly mammoths for example share dna with elephants and in modulating or creating a potential woolly mammoth they could say solve for there's i forget what the disease is called but there's this disease that's effectively called like elephant herpes that kills 20 of elephants around the world they could do that by testing on what would be this woolly mammoth before they make it and therefore like it's useful however when you get to the whole idea of maybe this technology then gets used to clone animals and then what if they start talking about cloning humans or something like that it's a slippery slope that potentially that's where i start no i'd love a clone i haven't i don't have enough hours in a day as you pointed out earlier i'm just joking look i i i think that society so one of the things that i'm so i don't know it's to me the guys might be great but it sounds like what they're doing is a bit like i mean like george church is presumably behind this behind all these years so george church needs to get out more i think needs it why do you say that well because i mean that's a big statement george is lovely he's just very mischievous let's put it that way he's very mischievous yeah what do you mean by that he he basically likes he like the same way i like a around my chemistry he likes to around biology uh-huh and i think you know um is he bad per person doing it no for sure not he's a great scientist but um i think he is literally trying to test the limits of where what do we want to do ethically what do we want to do commercially what are the driving should we you know here's a question um is this is very controversial well it is um low iq a curable disorder right if we can measure iq in some objective way um and then you say right you've got a choice between having someone with a high iq or low iq and you can genetically engineer high iq humans would you do it this gets weird this is what i mean this one's playing god i know what the answer is i mean i think i mean um well and i don't know what the answer is the answer is society will decide i think being mischievous in general one needs to pay attention to what is ethically acceptable and society acceptable but let's take today what is you know cesarean section um would we argue that cesarean section today is a fantastic tool sure so but a few hundred years ago it probably wouldn't be an acceptable right maybe and so i think that um we have to understand if engineering people to have a higher iq gave them better resilience to live and was better for the human race and actually stop people i don't know voting for nonsense parties or something not saying that low iq people vote for nonsense party i don't know right engineering critical thinking into humanity is that a good thing i don't know actually maybe just scrub that from the it's just it's just it's no i don't want to go there i see what you're saying i think it's just it's it's a weird uncomfortable space to get into with the questions because it's a slippery slope how far do you go something that seems realistic and good you start there and then eventually you're like yeah let's give them all 18 inch dicks too it gets weird yeah you said that not me um i would scrub this entire section no it's good okay i don't like scrubbing stuff at all we're gonna talk these things out why would i would i would say when it comes to so you're saying what let's discuss the ethics of genetic engineering or technological engineering in general and how to play god i would say it's society society needs to decide i'm very comfortable with certain technologies we have today like mobile phones cesarean section um if we could engineer um certain favorable attributes for humans genetically should we do it you know i can see a world where that just becomes acceptable over time it's very ghastly right now but why not why would you there is a good example in in the uk where we have what say three parent babies where when what happened was that there was a particular disorder i think passed on by the mother into mitochondria and i think you can find this is like a disorder where the mitochondria are so critically disabled you get a kind of muscular i'm not sure it's muscular dystrophy basically the child is not going to live for very long now what they did is they said right but the couple want to have children but the but the mother is never going to be able to have a healthy child because of that so what happened is that um there was a suggestion made that you could take healthy mitochondrial dna from another mother female donor put it into the cell right and so and the mitochondrial dna is just in that cell but the all the other characteristics from the mother comes from the actual mother and so you can give birth to children with three parents if you like but completely healthy and in the uk we did it and there's eight children and those children do not die a horrible death of muscular dystrophy yeah that isn't completely worthwhile right surface it's hard to argue with that yeah well no i mean sorry if i if i came sentient and i knew that i could have been born with i'd be pretty fucking pissed off yeah right i agree so you know so that's a good example and the good thing about that is it's all already gone through ethics and you know i can basically not debate the woolly mammoth and all the other people doing random stuff like that it's like fine if there's a market and you know jurassic park that's my worry though you've seen those fucking movies the dinosaurs eat the people well that's you know then no no no don't do that don't do that well don't you know me i don't like that i don't want to see like a t-rex out here just like tearing your head off if someone could actually get a resurrected t-rex i would want to pay for that be great okay that would be awesome if it's on a leash but look the probability of it being possible i don't know like you know we we have all sorts of things but i think that's a very good example a very positive thing now where could that be misused right your mitochondria are vital for energy to your cells if you supercharge that you can give rise to super athletes they could just exactly you know be like the russian olympic team but they have no steroids they've already got it but you know isn't isn't that in a way kind of interesting again but then do we start having like 12 foot giants walking we do have 12 foot giants have you tried i mean well we have six or seven foot giants i was gonna say i was unaware of these 12 footers please please do disclose you said that real confident yeah whatever like yeah okay no uh but but i'm saying we do have natural um biological capabilities so what's the word a genetic there's a genetic destiny but in western europe or whatever during you know the the i guess in the last few hundred years due to malnourishment we didn't achieve that genetic destiny right people were short then you have a little bit of a problem with the genetic destiny and then you have a little bit of a problem with the genetic destiny and then you have a little bit of a problem with the genetic destiny and then you have a little bit of a problem with the genetic destiny in the netherlands now everyone's like six foot whatever at all it's kind of interesting um but look um your question is am i worried that we can play god to some degree i'm worried about that with the chemical computers sorry all the computers could people just get these robots get this technology away from chemify and mass manufacture bad stuff well you know what i've done is i build encryption into the system and actually um gps they will have in the end gps um geolocated licenses do you have like a like a red button not to oversimplify it but like the button in in the dark night where morgan freeman hit it and the whole machine turned off like can you do that with your technology if it got in the wrong hands i i think that's um rather simplistic way of saying is there a way of making sure that i mean right now chemify builds his own robots do stuff internally and no one will be able to copy it right um because of the the way that we design things and segregate it will people be able to design things and segregate it they'll be able to design robots to do bad things for sure we have them today right yeah um i think my job um as a as an entrepreneur is to basically use the technology to do good things right and and the market to access that and then if you know there are people out there um using 3d printers to do chemistry to kind of biohack or chemical hack and they're going to be able to do more of those things so i think that's the way that we're going to be able to do more of those things so i think that's the way that we're going to be able to do more of that right but but well i know actually i am not so there's no one's there's nothing stopping people taking my papers off the web and using that those papers yeah but not the stuff you're actually creating yeah yeah yeah but is there a big road button there in the way the chemi farms are built there's obviously a huge amount of firewalling and being able to kind of control the system right real-time telemetry and also to make things feel that sure they feel fail to safety so for sure but um and when we do that we're going to be able to do a lot of things and we're going to scale i mean you know the amount of chemical flops right like you know you have cpu flops or whatever um is going to increase you know a hundred years ago computers were people in skyscrapers basically doing slide rules so the number of you know what were the number of floating point operations per second a hundred years ago several hundred thousand maybe several million because there's several million people in these places doing calculations with slide rules today how many people doing chemistry on the planet planet earth how many chemists are there doing reactions every day it's less than a million and probably more than a hundred thousand that's not a lot i think one of the ways that one of the ways why ai and physical ai is called chemify in a way will be positive for the us in particular is like the healthcare system is a bit bit annoying just now oh yeah but but think about like this in the future the birth rate is going down so human humans there's not that many humans and you want to keep people healthy and you want to keep people healthy and you want to keep people healthier for longer so people are basically able to get access to health care subscription and they have more productive lives and then make more money and have good fun and do whatever drive the economy suddenly you got this economy that inflates not because like that's right it's natural it's kind of amazing right yeah yeah and that scenario could be amazing i mean it will happen it's just a question of how we fuck it up along the way but but it will happen and it's um i i think that you know one by one bit by bit there's things that we're going to be able to solve and i think that that's why i you know i'm i'm a great kind of techno evangelist i'm not quite the abundance we're all going to live forever we've got infinite stuff we'll build a dyson sphere around the sun because why not but i do think that you know i very enthusiastic about the intersection of technology and science and critical thinking and also the free market but not entirely free and also well not kind of the corruption that we have right now that i do see where there's just like you know the only the only place where capitalism is really work is really meant is being forced to work maybe in the arguably in the u.s and the uk is in the middle classes like if you're really really rich you can do what you want if you're really oh right yeah yeah maybe that's me being slightly too kind of weird right and all the rich people say that's not right but no i think i think it's a fair point i think i think there's almost been like a socialized capitalism yeah that that's that's formed for sure and in the upper classes it's kind of weird yeah it's very weird but i i'm hoping that that will revert i mean the uk is like in the is in the doldrums like everyone's miserable in the uk it's such a terrible country it's like actually not it's great there's more entrepreneurs in the uk probably per capita than anywhere else in the world right now although it's quite nice that in france in switzerland and germany they were coming up not quite as good as the u.s but in but or not sorry not good is the wrong word not quite the same number but i think there's a lot of interesting things happening because people really are not as good as the u.s but in but or not sorry not good is the wrong word not quite the same thing but in but or not sorry not quite the same thing but in but or not quite the same thing realizing that you know it might be that the in 20 years time everyone everyone wants to be rather than being i don't know being a management consultant or working in a with a bank they want to be an entrepreneur that would be great and they're just basically identifying unmet needs and getting funding for the unmet needs and and then so we have this new kind of knowledge economy that evolves but i'm a relatively late entrepreneur i didn't want to be entrepreneur i kind of became one by accident well here you are yeah well it's working out for you it there you know the working out it's not about the money it's about the ability to appropriate appropriate sorry yeah what's the right word appropriate's wrong word um it's about to um allocate that thank you it's about allocating resource right i mean when chemify becomes a trillion dollar company i will be out allocate resource to helping cure disease solve the origin it takes on a whole new life of its own yeah i mean that's as long as dr james tour is not you know right and you're wrong dr james tour what is he right about what were you what will he be right about i don't know you tell me i just saw you guys going at it on pierce morgan oh what was his argument against yours i don't i don't i mean james is a complicated person he's a he's a he's a he's a born-again christian who is a chemistry professor but he's a kind of um i mean what is his his argument is that um he doesn't he's very slippery in his argument he just basically says hey the cell is so too complicated um therefore origin of life isn't as easy as we thought right and but i do believe that we'll solve it and it's not just you know you think we'll be able to no no he he says this is what he says right he says so he kind of makes all these oh i'm a real scientist and i'm do this that and the other but look dr james tour is a i wouldn't say dr james court is a scientist i what's the well i mean i'm gonna sound really pompous if i go down that rabbit hole but i mean i would say that um oh maybe he's a chemist first and scientist second whereas i'm a scientist first and a chemist second okay is that does that have to do with the way you're defining following the scientific method to ask questions versus no i mean i would say that i would say that james basically does chemistry he's very good at and he uses that authority to exert authority over his belief system i got it i got you whereas i'm like i'm clueless he says you know clueless clueless you're clueless everyone's clueless i'm like but that's why i love doing science because i'm clueless and and so and i mean i wouldn't use the word clueless because that just sounds silly but i do science why would i do experiments if i knew the answer already so you look at him as more dogmatic and like yeah it's harder for us to change whereas you're like we gotta yeah a lot of shit against the wall i mean i think so so i mean like i'm i i he i'm the only person that will debate him and i don't know what the origin of life chemists think about that and i think it is kind of complicated but also i i think i am willing to like talk to you talk to people that want to listen and give my views as flawed as they are but it starts a debate right i don't think right you know people come to me and say are you the authority on this i'm like i'm not the authority on anything but i am working on this and i think i've made a commitment to doing this and i've made some progress so from that regard i might have some expertise you might find valuable yeah but i think there's people over credentialize all the time and say well i'm a scientist and i get this so so i i think that you know you'd have to ask james what he thinks and the reason i did the thing which i was like in two minds when pierce did it though you go out there you challenge ideas you let people listen to the arguments and decide for themselves that's how you should always be yeah yeah went i thought what what could go wrong is he could rant at me and i could just go you know yeah i didn't i thought it was pretty civil he i mean he's pretty ranty and i just like i'm not going to argue i'm not going to i'm not going to descend into ad honam and i just want to say look this is what we're doing i think it's quite important that's right and i think it's quite interesting because i actually pierce is you know he's he he he has a religious commitment he also thinks that aliens must exist he's like he will he he has a huge following he asks sensible questions you know and um it was quite it was a fun debate to have looking at it i mean a few people said you surely want to do that and and i did it and one of my kids did watched it and was like this is the first time i've heard you ever talk about something and i understand it and i was like oh and if that and if my kid is like that's good was inspired by that and i was okay that's worth doing if nothing else right because right because i've talked i you know my really smart and i talked to them all the time and the guy was like one of my sons was like i have no clue what he talked about most of the time but on that on that discussion you made an effort to engage in a way that i understood it and i was inspired by it i was like i was like okay great it's worth doing always oh i honestly i hope you're always saying yes to that stuff because like you get a chance to put your evidence to the test and there's nothing better than that that's what we need we need to open dialogue with science but it's always great to have someone in to be able to talk for a few hours and walk us through all the cool shit they're doing so thank you as always lee we're gonna have to do this again let's let's go get some steak though now all right thanks to be with you and uh yeah till next time all right everybody else you know what it is give it a thought get back to me peace hey guys if you're not following me on spotify please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review they're both a huge huge help thank you